I Wonder If He Still Reads Here

Former friend Anglave became a former friend because he'd become someone who argued relentlessly in bad faith.

The specific conversation was about global warming, but it'd been long in coming.

This article reminds me so much of how he argued.

Particularly:

This concept ties into Artificial Intelligence efforts, which have yet to deal with a very specific problem. Software may be written that is very dynamic, that can learn. You can show the software, for instance, 5,000 pictures of deciduous trees, and eventually it learns (to a reasonable level of accuracy) that which is probably a tree. But then you show it a coniferous tree, and it will not recognize it as also being a tree. Now you must show thousands of additional pictures, and tell it these are all trees. Yet, show a toddler who can barely talk a picture of one tree, and he can usually make the intellectual leap. He grasps quickly the essence of what tree is.

The AI lacks the ability to extrapolate the essence of a thing. It’s a serious challenge in software development. Leftists pretend to lack this ability in order to score points. They want you to show them 5,000 Burger King hamburgers before admitting that this is fundamentally an American food. So I am withdrawing even the charity of suggesting they are stupid. They aren’t. Toddlers can do this, and they can’t? Give me a break. They know full well what they are doing. They are pretending to the stupidity if called out on their lies.

 It's not just you have to prove it's a tree to a ridiculous standard, it's that you have to prove it's a tree over and over and over.  Having to start from scratch from base principles every time any one of several topics comes up, and there's no avoiding those topics because they can't wait to bring them up.

Another irritant is the claim that they don't know much about a given topic, but sure do have copious links at hand to smother any statement you have to make on it.

More than once I took the time to read all of those links and the sub-links and found that despite the wide "consensus" they all, ultimately, led to a single source for their conclusion.

A source got presented as being multiple sources because many news outlets repeated it.

I am well rid of "friends" like that.

PS: He's also the first person of my acquaintance who gave me a lecture on why I shouldn't be offended when they were being offensive and refused to apologize for it.  Sadly, not the last.