Nick_Tarleton comments on In defense of the outside view - Less Wrong

14 Post author: cousin_it 15 January 2010 11:01AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (26)
Tags: outside_view

Comments (26)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 15 January 2010 06:38:50PM *  5 points [-]

One of the poster-child cases for the outside view (mentioned by Eliezer, no less!) dealt with students trying to estimate completion times for their academic projects. And what is AGI if not a research project? One might say AGI is too large for the analogy to work, but outside view helpfully tells us that large projects aren't any more immune to failures and schedule overruns :-)

Hence Eliezer_2009's refusal to make quantitative predictions.

If we'd just heard of this random dude named Barack Obama, we'd be perfectly justified in saying he won't become President! Which would be the proper analogy to first hearing about Dennett and his work.

If you're not going to look at Dennett's arguments and you're not going to take into account others' claims that Dennett is interesting, how will your opinion ever change?

Comment author: cousin_it 15 January 2010 08:32:41PM *  1 point [-]

I will update if/when I see a short convincing explanation of his solution or a substantial number of other people acknowledge that it's correct. My little experience with Dennett's writing hasn't yet turned up anything interesting, much less anything novel+correct.

Comment author: Bo102010 16 January 2010 02:48:27AM *  2 points [-]

Really? Reading a new Dennet book or paper is always a joy for me.

If you'd like to get more Dennett in short bits, this page has a nice archive.

Comment author: RobinZ 16 January 2010 03:22:01AM *  1 point [-]

There's a lot of links on that page; that's a joy to a Dennett fan such as myself (I upvoted!), but for someone not previously interested, pointing out a couple particularly enjoyable ones might be helpful.

Edit: I like Explaining the 'Magic' of Consciousness - it, too, is relevant to the recent remarks on consciousness, and it follows Dennett's analytical style quite closely.

Comment author: Bo102010 16 January 2010 03:30:45AM *  2 points [-]

I'd recommend clicking on links with interesting titles, but some ones to check out:

Comment author: whpearson 15 January 2010 09:41:48PM 1 point [-]

I find the intentional stance interesting. Although we won't get much further at AI unless we can switch to the design stance of an intelligence.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit