Interest in Private Catholic Online Apologetics Forum

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Interest in Private Catholic Online Apologetics Forum Christanon 08/15/18 (Wed) 18:21:24 103c27 No.688119

Hi everyone,

I'm planning on setting up a private forum for catholic apologetics online. For the discussion of good responses to all the anti-christian and anti-catholic propaganda and comments that are rampant on the internet, especially on reddit, twitter and other social media. For the people who think that the internet / comments / etc do not influence people or this is a waste of time, then this post is not for you.

For the people who have been influenced by the internet, and who think that this is the new modern day arena where we have to defend the faith and spread the gospel, then that's good. This ideally is just the beginning of a much larger project, but this would just be a preliminary step, to put out feelers to see how many people are interested in this. Essentially we would post different objections and conversations that we have trying to defend the faith, discussing the best ways to silence critics, etc.

I'm actually doing graduate studies in Artificial Intelligence / Natural Language Processing, and i'm planning on developing a system which can scan posts such as on twitter or reddit and automatically identify posts that are speaking contrary to the faith, spreading misinformation etc, and then also identifying what sort of fallacy or false point they are pushing, and even provide a template of a reponse (that of course could/would be hand edited, customized). Eventually I would also be willing to financially compensate people to work on defending the faith and doing online apologetics. I've seen many people receive bad information online, question their faith, convert to other faiths, lose their faith and more due at least in part to the internet, people that they have talked to on the internet and the information they have received there. Many people are very impressionable and people more than ever are growing up heavily on the internet. I feel more and more this is an area of my calling.

So if anyone is interested in working on this project, please let me know. To begin with, we would just start with working on refuting some basic posts that we would see in the wild. We can build up a knowledge base on the best arguments to use in certain circumstances, keep and accumulate a corpus of different interactions, how they went, common responses etc. Even just labelling posts as saying they are hostile to the faith, labelling what sort of false argument they use etc is also valuable.

Please let me know! Pax Christi.

Christanon 08/15/18 (Wed) 21:03:38 277de9 No.688169

Things for catholics online:

-Try to trigger people with your idolatry

-Tell stories about how people reacted to your behavior

-Tell people you have no authority on scripture then tell someone, who could well be a priest, that they're wrong on some point

-Pretend that your interpretation of someone's else's words are authority and try to use it in arguments

-Try to trigger people with your ignorance of scripture, except apocrypha

-Act like revealing the fact of a crime is worse than the crime itself, use what-aboutism to deflect real criticism

<*and more!

Christanon 08/15/18 (Wed) 21:21:10 7fe080 No.688174

>>688119

>automatically identify posts that are speaking contrary to the faith, spreading misinformation etc

Is this possible?

>if anyone is interested in working on this project, please let me know

If your software is going to be open source, then I will be glad to participate in the project. Also it will be my pleasure to see the scientific publications related to this project.

Christanon 08/15/18 (Wed) 21:42:15 b2572f No.688185

Everything you want to do has already been happening for 2000 years in that little thing we call "the Church" via seminaries, monasteries, universities, the Magisterium, etc..

Christanon 08/15/18 (Wed) 22:28:04 dc0b2c No.688199

>>688119

What would the purpose of it being "private" serve? Shouldn't apologetics invite opposing viewpoints for sake of discussion? Or is this like top secret weapon stuff against heresies and opponents of the Church? Also, what's wrong with Catholic Answers dot com? They pretty much have everything needed for both laymen and seasoned apologists. Not discouraging you in any way, anon. It's just that you might have to provide something not already available elsewhere for this to pop off.

Christanon 08/16/18 (Thu) 03:26:18 103c27 No.688296

>>688174

It's definitely possible - and yeah I am working on it. My thesis is on this sort of text classification. One main thing we need is high quality labelled data. One plan is to get a browser extension that some people can use that when they see certain posts they can label it with different flags. Good labelled data is key to developing a good classifier. The better quality data you have the better it is.

>>688199

Catholic Answers has a bunch of nonsense in terms of articles, like Jimmy Akin spouting nonsense like Jews are doubly justified etc. The point of a private forum is to discuss specific posts that we see, discuss what the best way to refute or tackle specific people's posts or arguments etc. The reason why it should be private is that I don't want it open to the public for everyone to see how we are approaching these questions. Like for people to find out there's a team of 5 people or so coming up with answers to reply to a post, or trolling, making fake accounts, sowing discord etc.

And that's like saying why don't we discuss things on r/christianity. When it gets overrun with atheists and stuff there is no point. Also I don't want this to pop off. It's just supposed to be a small group of dedicated people working together. Right now it would just be people who have an interest in doing this at the moment. Ideally it should be people who are actively defending the faith online already a lot. Not just for casual browsers.

Eventually though once things are more developed I will be paying people to contribute as well, but that's further down the line.

Christanon 08/16/18 (Thu) 15:50:25 3884bd No.688469

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>>688119

>graduate studies in Artificial Intelligence / Natural Language Processing, and i'm planning on developing a system which can scan posts such as on twitter or reddit and automatically identify posts that are speaking contrary to the faith, spreading misinformation etc, and then also identifying what sort of fallacy or false point they are pushing

Good luck with that

Also

>OP builds Christian counter-propagandist robot that becomes self-aware and seizes control of the globe

You're not inadvertently building the anti-Christ are you? ;^)))

Christanon 08/16/18 (Thu) 16:39:28 4b0100 No.688492

I don't think an army of paid shills is the answer, bro.

Christanon 08/16/18 (Thu) 20:42:05 103c27 No.688581

>>688492

well regardless of what you want to deem as paid shills (rather than eventually compensating people for their time, oh wait, are monks and priests and missionaries paid shills too now?), as if missionary work does work. as if the LGBT faggotry agenda hasn't converted much of the world already. and so on. anyways again, this is for people who find this interesting and want to work on it, someone who is already actively involved in defending the faith online as it is.