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Roko comments on What is bunk? - Less Wrong
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Comments (101)
That's precisely the point I'm trying to make. We do lose a lot by ignoring correct contrarians. I think academia may be losing a lot of knowledge by filtering crudely. If indeed there is no mainstream academic position, pro or con, on Friendly AI, I think academia is missing something potentially important.
On the other hand, institutions need some kind of a filter to avoid being swamped by crackpots. A rational university or journal or other institution, trying to avoid bias, should probably assign more points to "promiscuous investigators," people with respected mainstream work who currently spend time analyzing contrarian claims, whether to confirm or debunk. (I think Robin Hanson is a "promiscuous investigator.")
If true, it will eventually be accepted by the academia. Ironically enough, there will be no academia in the present sense anymore.
My social intuitions tell me it is generally a bad idea to say words like 'kill' (as opposed to, say, 'overwrite', 'fatally reorganize', or 'dismantle for spare part(icle)s') in describing scenarios like that, as they resemble some people's misguided intuitions about anthropomorphic skynet dystopias. On Less Wrong it matters less, but if one was trying to convince an e.g. non-singularitarian transhumanist that singularitarian ideas were important, then subtle language cues like that could have big effects on your apparent theoretical leaning and the outcome of the conversation. (This is more of a general heuristic than a critique of your comment, Roko.)
Good point, but one of the possibilities is the UFAI takes long enough to become completely secure in its power that it actually does try to eliminate people as a threat or a slowing factor. Since in this scenario, unlike in the "take apart for raw materials" scenario, people dying is the UFAI's intended outcome and not just a side effect, "kill" seems an accurate word.
I like to use the word "eat"; it's short, evocative, and basically accurate. We are edible.
I want a uFAI lolcat that says "I can has ur constituent atomz?" and maybe a "nom nom nom" next to an Earth-sized paper clip.
I'd never thought about that, but it sounds very likely, and deserves to be pointed out in more than just this comment.
I don't expect the post Singularity world as something pretty much as an extended today, with scientists in postlabs and postuniversities and waitresses in postpubs
A childish assumption.
Come on, where else could I possibly get my postbeer?
http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/three-myths-about-scientific-peer-review/
is a post that I find relevant.
Peer-Review is about low hanging branches, the stuff supported by enough evidence already that writing about it can be done easily by sourcing extensive support from prior work.
As for the damage of ignoring correct contrarians, there was a nobel prize in economics awarded for a paper on markets with asymmetric information which a reviewer rejected with a comment like "If this is correct then all of economics is wrong".
There is also the story of someone who failed to get a PhD for their work presenting it on multiple seperate occasions, the last of which Einstein was in the room and said it was correct (and it was).
You might be thinking of de Broglie. Einstein was called in to review his PhD thesis. Though he did end up getting his PhD (and the Nobel).
Another near-miss case also preceding peer review was Arrhenius's PhD thesis.
Does "Friendly AI and the Singularity" qualify as being "a hypothesis" in the first place?
"Friendly AI" seems more like an action plan - and "the Singularity" seems to be a muddled mixture of ideas - some of which are more accurate than others.