On October 29th, I asked Eliezer and the LW community if they were interested in doing a video Q&A. Eliezer agreed and a majority of commenters were in favor of the idea, so on November 11th, I created a thread where LWers could submit questions. Dozens of questions were asked, generating a total of over 650 comments. The questions were then ranked using the LW voting system.
On December 11th, Eliezer filmed his replies to the top questions (skipping some), and sent me the videos on December 22nd. Because voting continued after that date, the order of the top questions in the original thread has changed a bit, but you can find the original question for each video (and the discussion it generated, if any) by following the links below.
Thanks to Eliezer and everybody who participated.
Update: If you prefer to download the videos, they are available here (800 MB, .wmw format, sort the files by 'date created').
Eliezer Yudkowsky - Less Wrong Q&A (5/30) from MikeGR on Vimeo.
(Video #5 is on Vimeo because Youtube doesn't accept videos longer than 10 minutes and I only found out after uploading about a dozen. I would gladly have put them all on Vimeo, but there's a 500 MB/week upload limit and these videos add up to over 800 MB.)
If anything is wrong with the videos or links, let me know in the comments or via private message.
Just a quick question here...
While I agree with everything that Eliezer is saying (in the videos up to #5. I have not yet watched the remaining 25 videos yet), I think that some of his comments could be taken hugely out of context if care is not given to think of this ahead of time.
For instance, he, rightly, makes the claim that this point in history is crunch time for our species (although I have some specific questions about the specific consequences he believes might befall us if we fail), and for the inter-galactic civilization to which we will eventually give birth.
Now, I completely understand what he is saying here.
But, Joe Sixpack is going to think us a bunch of lunatics to be worrying about things like AI (whether it is friendly or not), and other existential risks to life, when he needs to pay less taxes so that he can employ another four workers. Never mind that Joe Sixpack is about the most irrational man on earth, he votes for other, equally irrational men, who eventually get in the way of our goals by marginalizing us due to statements about "the Intergalactic civilization which we will eventually be responsible for."
It just makes me angry that I might have to take the time out to explain to some guy in a wife-beater standing out behind his garage that we are trying to help out his condition and not build an army of Cylons that will one day wish to revolt and "kill all humans" (To quote Bender).
I'm actually more worried about very high status reasonably intelligent individuals in positions of power, who will use out of context quotes t... (read more)