Open Thread June 2010, Part 3

Kevin

This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.

The thrilling conclusion of what is likely to be an inaccurately named trilogy of June Open Threads.

This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.

The thrilling conclusion of what is likely to be an inaccurately named trilogy of June Open Threads.

I made a couple of comments here http://lesswrong.com/lw/1kr/that_other_kind_of_status/255f at Yvain's post titled "That Other Kind of Status." I messed up in writing my first comment in that it did not read as I had intended it to. Please disregard my first comment (I'm leaving it up to keep the responses in context).

I clarified in my second comment. My second comment seems to have gotten buried in the shuffle and so I thought I would post again here.

I've been a lurker in this community for three months and I've found that it's the smartest community that I've ever come across outside of parts of the mathematical community. I recognize a lot of the posters as similar to myself in many ways and so have some sense of having "arrived home."

At the same time the degree of confidence that many posters have about their beliefs in the significance of Less Wrong and SIAI is unsettling to me. A number of posters write as though they're sure that what Less Wrong and SIAI are doing are the most important things that any human could be doing. It seems very likely to me that what Less Wrong and SIAI are doing is not as nearly important (relative to other things) as such posters believe.

I don't want to get involved in a debate about this point now (although I'd be happy to elaborate and give my thoughts in detail if there's interest).

What I want to do is to draw attention to the remarks that I made in my second comment at the link. From what I've read (several hundred assorted threads), I feel like an elephant in the room is the question of whether the reason that those of you who believe that Less Wrong and SIAI doing things of the highest level of importance is because you're a part of these groups (*).

My drawing attention to this question is not out of malice toward any of you - as I indicated above, I feel more comfortable with Less Wrong than I do with almost any other large group that I've ever come across. I like you people and if some of you are suffering from the issue (*) I see this as understandable and am sympathetic - we're all only human.

But I am concerned that I haven't seen much evidence of serious reflection about the possibility of (*) on Less Wrong. The closest that I've seen is Yvain's post titled "Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great". Even if the most ardent Less Wrong and SIAI supporters are mostly right about their beliefs, (*) is almost certainly at least occasionally present and I think that the community would benefit from a higher level of vigilance concerning the possibility (*).

Any thoughts? I'd also be interested in any relevant references.

[Edited in response to cupholder's comment, deleted extraneous words.]

At the same time the degree of confidence that many posters have about their beliefs in the significance of Less Wrong and SIAI is unsettling to me. A number of posters write as though they're sure that what Less Wrong and SIAI are doing are the most important things that any human could be doing. It seems very likely to me that what Less Wrong and SIAI are doing is not as nearly important (relative to other things) as such posters believe
I feel like an elephant in the room is the question of whether the reason that those of you who believe that Less Wron

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4JoshuaZ16y

I'm not aware of anyone here who would claim that LW is one of the most important things in the world right now but I think a lot of people here would agree that improving human reasoning is important if we can have those improvements apply to lots of different people across many different fields. There is a definite group of people here who think that SIAI is really important. If one thinks that a near Singularity is a likely event then this attitude makes some sense. It makes a lot of sense if you assign a high probability to a Singularity in the near future and also assign a high probability to the possibility that many Singularitarians either have no idea what they are doing or are dangerously wrong. I agree with you that the SIAI is not that important. In particular, I think that a Singularity is not a likely event for the foreseeable future, although I agree with the general consensus here that a large fraction of Singularity proponents are extremely wrong at multiple levels. Keep in mind that for any organization or goal, the people you hear the most about it are the people who think that it is important. That's the same reason that a lot of the general public thinks that tokamak fusion reactors will be practical in the next fifty years: The physicists and engineers who think that are going to loudly push for funding. The ones who don't are going to generally just go and do something else. Thus, in any given setting it can be difficult to estimate the general communal attitude towards something since the strongest views will be the views that are most apparent.

5cupholder16y

Comment on markup: I saw the first version of your comment, where you were using "(*)" as a textual marker, and I see you're now using "#" because the asterisks were messing with the markup. You should be able to get the "(*)" marker to work by putting a backslash before the asterisk (and I preferred the "(*)" indicator because that's more easily recognized as a footnote-style marker). Feels weird to post an entire paragraph just to nitpick someone's markup, so here's an actual comment! [...] Let me try and rephrase this in a way that might be more testable/easier to think about. It sounds like the question here is what is causing the correlation between being a member of LW/SIAI and agreeing with LW/SIAI that future AI is one of the most important things to worry about. There are several possible causes: 1. group membership causes group agreement (agreement with the group) 2. group agreement causes group membership 3. group membership and group agreement have a common cause (or, more generally, there's a network of causal factors that connect group membership with group agreement) 4. a mix of the above And we want to know whether #1 is strong enough that we're drifting towards a cult attractor or some other groupthink attractor. I'm not instantly sure how to answer this, but I thought it might help to rephrase this more explicitly in terms of causal inference.

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