Imnimo 1 day ago

My favorite part about the original paper is that it was written during a time when "extra-sensory perception" was a big fad, and Turing bought into the idea. He admits that the most likely failure of his test is that humans could perform ESP while computers could not. It's such a weird historical artifact - if he had come up with the idea 10 years earlier or later, it seems unlikely the ESP section would have ever made it in.

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throw4847285 1 day ago

It's like Newton and alchemy. Just because you're a genius doesn't mean you can't also be a crank. Many such cases.

bbor 18 hours ago

IMHO there's something to be said for innovative, paradigm-defining[1] thinkers being more likely to accept frameworks that we in hindsight recognize as definitively disproven. Not to say alchemy was exactly an open question in Newtonian Britain, ofc -- but certainly not as resoundingly disproven as it is post-Darwin & Lavoisier

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-revolutions/ , https://archive.org/details/thomas-s.-kuhn-the-structure-of-...