Paying People to Argue With You (or How a Guy Found a Novel Use for Amazon's Mech Turk)

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12 points·chaostheory··4 comments

Would anyone else be interested in renting out the services of one or more professional devil's advocates if such a service existed? I thought of setting up a website a while back doing this as a consulting thing, but I wasn't sure if there would be any market.

Heh, I had the same idea, probably because I enjoy arguing and finding flaws in arguements so much. If anyone does start this up, let me know, I'll help! However, I suspect the market for telling people what they want to hear is much bigger ;)

The origin of the term 'Devil's advocate' is interesting, "Formerly, during the canonization process of the Roman Catholic Church, the Promoter of the Faith, or Devil's Advocate, was a canon lawyer appointed by the Church to argue against the canonization of the candidate. It was his job to take a skeptical view of the candidate's character, to look for holes in the evidence, to argue that any miracles attributed to the candidate were fraudulent, etc. The Devil's advocate was opposed by God's advocate, whose job was to make the argument in favor of canonization." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil's_advocate#Origin]

The most fun way to do this would be more as a "social" site, assigning "karma" for good conversational points. And, if profit is desired (when isn't it?), competitions with small entry fees could also be set up on the site.

Wow, so now all us wanna-be essayists can thank people at the end of our posts like PG does. Except that nobody will have ever heard of the people we thank.

Of course, you could just send copies unbidden to people anyway. Hmm.

Thanks to Al Gore, Donald Knuth, Warren Buffett and Sergei Brin for reading early drafts of this comment.

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