As promised, here is the "Q" part of the Less Wrong Video Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky.
The Rules
1) One question per comment (to allow voting to carry more information about people's preferences).
2) Try to be as clear and concise as possible. If your question can't be condensed to a few paragraphs, you should probably ask in a separate post. Make sure you have an actual question somewhere in there (you can bold it to make it easier to scan).
3) Eliezer hasn't been subpoenaed. He will simply ignore the questions he doesn't want to answer, even if they somehow received 3^^^3 votes.
4) If you reference certain things that are online in your question, provide a link.
5) This thread will be open to questions and votes for at least 7 days. After that, it is up to Eliezer to decide when the best time to film his answers will be. [Update: Today, November 18, marks the 7th day since this thread was posted. If you haven't already done so, now would be a good time to review the questions and vote for your favorites.]
Suggestions
Don't limit yourself to things that have been mentioned on OB/LW. I expect that this will be the majority of questions, but you shouldn't feel limited to these topics. I've always found that a wide variety of topics makes a Q&A more interesting. If you're uncertain, ask anyway and let the voting sort out the wheat from the chaff.
It's okay to attempt humor (but good luck, it's a tough crowd).
If a discussion breaks out about a question (f.ex. to ask for clarifications) and the original poster decides to modify the question, the top level comment should be updated with the modified question (make it easy to find your question, don't have the latest version buried in a long thread).
Update: Eliezer's video answers to 30 questions from this thread can be found here.
There's certainly always a point in considering specific arguments. But to be nervous merely that someone else has a different view, one ought, generally speaking, to suspect (a) that they know something you do not or at least (b) that you know no more than them (or far more rarely (c) that you are in a situation of mutual Aumann awareness and equal mutual respect for one another's meta-rationality). As far as I'm concerned, these are eminent scientists from outside the field that I work in, and I have no evidence that they did anything more than snap judgment of my own subject material. It's not that I have specific reason to distrust these people - the main name I recognize is Horvitz and a fine name it is. But the prior probabilities are not good here.
I don't actually spend time obsessing about that sort of thing except when you're asking me those sorts of questions - putting so much energy into self-justification and excuses would just slow me down if Horvitz showed up tomorrow with an argument I hadn't considered.
I'll say again: I think there's much to be said for the Traditional Rationalist ideal of - once you're at least inside a science and have enough expertise to evaluate the arguments - paying attention only when people lay out their arguments on the table, rather than trying to guess authority (or arguing over who's most meta-rational). That's not saying "there's no point in considering the views of others". It's focusing your energy on the object level, where your thought time is most likely to be productive.
Is it that awful to say: "Show me your reasons"? Think of the prior probabilities!
You admit you have not done much to make it easy to show them your reasons. You have not written up your key arguments in a compact form using standard style and terminology and submitted it to standard journals. You also admit you have not contacted any of them to ask them for their reasons; Horvitz would have have to "show up" for you to listen to him. This looks a lot like a status pissing contest; the obvious interpretation: Since you think you are better than them, you won't ask them for their reasons, and you won't make it easy for them t... (read more)