User talk:Lightbound

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Deletion discussion

Hi, Lightbound. I'm replying to your comment here, since it pertains to our interactions more so than to the original article. My goal in criticizing you was not to win an argument or score points, but to provide feedback on how to resolve future disputes on WP more productively. My main concerns were:

You appeared to be trying to drive David Pearce, a respected and influential transhumanist philosopher, out of the discussion. Apparently you were concerned that he was a 'meat puppet' or had a 'conflict of interest', mainly on the grounds that he'd written about the topic before; but that's not of course a norm on WP, since it would entail that experts are forbidden from contributing to WP about anything they have prior expertise in. Pearce may not be an expert here, but his having peer-reviewed publications in an area does not make him less useful to have a discussion with.
You changed topics too much, without engaging with detailed responses to your earlier arguments. E.g., you claimed the article's topic was a 'fringe theory' (and that the peer-reviewed publications discussing it were somehow sham), and that this somehow made it deletion-worthy, on the grounds that you intuited that the halting problem implied the 'mathematical impossibility' of 'Friendly AI'. Yet you haven't provided any argument, any citation, or even any elaboration to substantiate that claim; so it just hangs there. That makes things too difficult on the closing admin, who has to evaluate the strength of the arguments more so than their number or vociferousness, and won't be able to do so with arguments that are left largely implicit.
You alleged that anyone who disagreed with you by the end of the discussion was acting in bad faith. That's a very serious claim, and shouldn't be your first (or second, or third, or fourth) reaction to seeing arguments against your view, especially when others can't access the mathematical intuitions you're experiencing until you've written them up.

I hope our future discussion can be a bit more productive, and I welcome the feedback you gave too. The above is meant to help keep you in touch with how others may be seeing your arguments so you can adjust to be a more effective discussant; it's not meant as a lecture, power play, personal attack, etc. -Silence (talk) 16:40, 1 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In regards to (1) I was pointing out the fact the source he was pumping was not WP:INDEPENDENT, and that was revealed to be true with links presented. It was shown that it was a non-technical anthology. So, "peer-reviewed" here is not the same as, say, Nature, or ACM journals peer-review. This was raised by several other editors and ignored. Also, by being written by or having been organized with authors with close working relationships it exposes it as a non-independent source. That is clearly specified in the guidelines. In regards to (2), there isn't much to say. It's a discussion and many arguments are being raised and refuted. It is also a complex page with many people engaging. The part about it being mathematically impossible is that the burden of proof is on editors to substantiate a page as being worthy of inclusion. Discussions arguing for or against the hypothetical scenarios or agents do not substantiate the nature or technical specification in any way. Lastly, in regards to (3), the statement was that it would seem unreasonable to continue to refute evidence when the author himself claimed it was a theory, and when PDFs and links by the author of the theory himself were presented to back this up multiple times and from multiple sources. It is unreasonable to argue against evidence when it was explicitly stated by the person who created the concept that the article is about. It was not a general statement about faith in discussion, and that is part of the very narrative building and goading that prompted me to make the admin notice. --☯Lightbound☯ talk 18:29, 1 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom elections are now open!

Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:05, 24 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]