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EStokes comments on Should I believe what the SIAI claims? - Less Wrong
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I don't think this post was well-written, at the least. I didn't even understand the tl;dr?
I don't see much precise expansion on this, except for MWI? There's a sequence on it.
Have you read the sequences?
As for why there aren't more people supporting SIAI, first of all, it's not widely known, second of all, it's liable to be dismissed on first impressions. Not many have examined the SIAI. Also, only (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion#cite_ref-49)[4% of the general public in the US believe in neither a god nor a higher power]. The majority isn't always right.
I don't understand why this post has upvotes. It was unclear and seems topics went unresearched. The usefulness of donating to the SIAI has been discussed before, I think someone probably would've posted a link if asked in the open thread.
I think the obvious answer to this is that there are a significant number of people out there, even out there in the LW community, who share XiXiDu's doubts about some of SIAIs premises and conclusions, but perhaps don't speak up with their concerns either because a) they don't know quite how to put them into words, or b) they are afraid of being ridiculed/looked down on.
Unfortunately, the tone of a lot of the responses to this thread lead me to believe that those motivated by the latter option may have been right to worry.
Personally, I upvoted the OP because I wanted to help motivate Eliezer to reply to it. I don't actually think it's any good.
Yeah, I agree (no offense XiXiDu) that it probably could have been better written, cited more specific objections etc. But the core sentiment is one that I think a lot of people share, and so it's therefore an important discussion to have. That's why it's so disappointing that Eliezer seems to have responded with such an uncharacteristically thin skin, and basically resorted to calling people stupid (sorry, "low g-factor") if they have trouble swallowing certain parts of the SIAI position.
This was exactly my impression, also.
I think your upvote probably backfired, because (I'm guessing) Eliezer got frustrated that such a badly written post got upvoted so quickly (implying that his efforts to build a rationalist community were less successful than he had thought/hoped) and therefore responded with less patience than he otherwise might have.
Then you should have written your own version of it. Bad posts that get upvoted just annoy me on a visceral level and make me think that explaining things is hopeless, if LWers still think that bad posts deserve upvotes. People like XiXiDu are ones I've learned to classify as noisemakers who suck up lots of attention but who never actually change their minds enough to start pitching in, no matter how much you argue with them. My perceptual system claims to be able to classify pretty quickly whether someone is really trying or not, and I have no concrete reason to doubt it.
I guess next time I'll try to remember not to reply at all.
Everyone else, please stop upvoting posts that aren't good. If you're interested in the topic, write your own version of the question.
It has seemed to me for a while that a number of people will upvote any post that goes against the LW 'consensus' position on cryonics/Singularity/Friendliness, so long as it's not laughably badly written.
I don't think anything Eliezer can say will change that trend, for obvious reasons.
However, most of us could do better in downvoting badly argued or fatally flawed posts. It amazes me that many of the worst posts here won't drop below 0 for any stated amount of time, and even then not very far. Docking someone's karma isn't going to kill them, folks. Do everyone a favor and use those downvotes.
My post is neither badly argued nor fatally flawed as I've mainly been asking questions and not making arguments. But if you think otherwise, why don't you argue where I am fatally flawed?
My post has not been written to speak out against any 'consensus', I agree with the primary conclusions but am skeptic about further chains of reasoning based on those conclusions as I don't perceive them to be based on firm ground but merely be what follows from previous evidence.
And yes, I'm a lazy bum. I've not thought about the OP for more than 10 minutes. It's actually copy and paste work from previous comments. Hell, what have you expected? A dissertation? Nobody else was asking those questions, someone had to.
What are you considering as pitching in? That I'm donating as I am, or that I am promoting you, LW and the SIAI all over the web, as I am doing?
You simply seem to take my post as hostile attack rather than the inquiring of someone who happened not to be lucky enough to get a decent education in time.
Eliezer seems to have run your post through some crude heuristic and incorrectly categorized it. While you did make certain errors that many people have observed, I think you deserved a different response.
At least, Eliezer seemingly not realizing that you are a donor means that his treatment of you doesn't represent how he treats donors.
Edit: To his credit, Eliezer apologized and admitted to his perceptual misclassification.
All right, I'll note that my perceptual system misclassified you completely and consider that concrete reason to doubt it from now on.
Sorry.
If you are writing a post like that one it is really important to tell me that you are an SIAI donor. It gets a lot more consideration if I know that I'm dealing with "the sort of thing said by someone who actually helps" and not "the sort of thing said by someone who wants an excuse to stay on the sidelines, and who will just find another excuse after you reply to them", which is how my perceptual system classified that post.
The Summit is coming up and I've got lots of stuff to do right at this minute, but I'll top-comment my very quick attempt at pointing to information sources for replies.
I'll donate again in the next few days and tell you what name and the amount. I don't have much, but so that you see that I'm not just making this up. Maybe you can also check the previous donation then.
And for the promoting, everyone can Google it. I link people up to your stuff almost every day. And there are people here who added me to Facebook and if you check my info you'll see that some of my favorite quotations are actually yours.
And how come that on my homepage, if you check the sidebar, your homepage and the SIAI are listed under favorite sites, for many years now?
I'm the kind of person who has to be skeptic about everything and if I'm bothered too much by questions I cannot resolve in time I do stupid things. Maybe this post was stupid, I don't know.
Sorry about this sounding impolite towards XiXiDu, but I'll use this opportunity to note that it is a significant problem for SIAI, that there are people out there like XiXiDu promoting SIAI even though they don't understand SIAI much at all.
I don't know what's the best attitude to try to minimize the problem this creates, that many people will first run into SIAI through hearing about it from people who don't seem very clueful or intelligent. (That's real bayesian evidence for SIAI being a cult or just crazy, and many people then won't acquire sufficient additional evidence to update out of the misleading first impression -- not to mention that the biased way of getting stuck in first impressions is very common also.)
Personally, I've adopted the habit of not even trying to talk about singularity stuff to new people who aren't very bright. (Of course, if they become interested despite this, then they can't just be completely ignored.)
I thought about that too. But many people outside this community suspect me, as they often state, to be intelligent and educated. And I mainly try to talk to people in the academics. You won't believe that even I am able to make them think that I'm one of them, up to the point of correcting errors in their calculations (it happened). Many haven't even heard about Bayesian inference by the way...
The way I introduce people to this is not by telling them about the risks of AGI but rather linking them up to specific articles on lesswrong.com or telling them about how the SIAI tries to develop ethical decision making etc.
I've grown up in a family of Jehovah's Witnesses, I know how to start selling bullshit. Not that the SIAI is bullshit, but I'd never use words like 'Singularity' while promoting it to people I don't know.
Many people know about the transhumanist/singularity fraction already and think it is complete nonsense, so I often can only improve their opinion.
There are people teaching on university level that told me I convinced them that he (EY) is to be taken seriously.
What you state is good evidence that you are not one of those too stupid people I was talking about (even though you have managed to not understand what SIAI is saying very well). Thanks for presenting the evidence, and correcting my suspicion that someone on your level of non-comprehension would usually end up doing more harm than good.
It was actually in the post
So you might suggest to your perceptual system to read the post first (at least before issuing a strong reply).
I also donated to SIAI, and it was almost all the USD I had at the time, so I hope posters here take my questions seriously. (I would donate even more if someone would just tell me how to make USD.)
Also, I don't like when this internet website is overloaded with noise posts that don't accomplish anything.
Clippy, you represent a concept that is often used to demonstrate what a true enemy of goodness in the universe would look like, and you've managed to accrue 890 karma. I think you've gotten a remarkably good reception so far.
I think we have different ideas of noise
Though I would miss you as the LW mascot if you stopped adding this noise.
Depending on your expertise and assets, this site might provide some ways.
I'm pretty sure Clippy meant "make" in a very literal sense.
Yeah, I want to know how to either produce the notes that will be recognized as USD, or access the financial system in a way that I can believably tell it that I own a certain amount of USD. The latter method could involve root access to financial institutions.
All the other methods of getting USD are disproportionately hard (_/
I find it difficult to write stuff I don't believe.
Noted.
I upvoted the original post for:
A question to those who dismiss the OP as merely "noise": what do you make of the nature of this post?
I am reminded of this passage regarding online communities (source):
As someone who thought the OP was of poor quality, and who has had a very high opinion of SIAI and EY for a long time (and still has), I'll say that that "Eliezer Yudkowsky facts" was indeed a lot worse. It was the most embarrassing thing I've ever read on this site. Most of those jokes aren't even good.
They are very good examples of the genre (Chuck Norris-style jokes). I for one could not contain my levity.
Fact: Evaluating humor about Eliezer Yudkowsky always results in an interplay between levels of meta-humor such that the analysis itself is funny precisely when the original joke isn't.
Wow, I thought it was one of the best. By that post I actually introduced a philosopher (who teaches in Sweden), who's been skeptic about EY, to read up on the MWI sequence and afterwards agree that EY is right.
I like that post - of course, few of the jokes are funny, but you read such a thing for the few gems they do contain. I think of it as hanging a lampshade (warning, TV tropes) on one of the problems with this website.
I was embarrassed by most of the facts. The one about my holding up a blank sheet of paper and saying "a blank map does not correspond to a blank territory" and thus creating the universe is one I still tell at parties.
What, why are you talking about a hostile attack?
Of course I didn't feel that it would be that. It's quite the opposite, it felt to me like communicating an unhealthy air of hero worship.
Then I have been the one to completely misinterpret what you said. Apologize, I'm not good at this.
I've said it before the OP but failed miserably:
I should quit now and for some time stop participating on LW. I have to continue with my studies. I was only drawn here by the deletion incident. Replies and that it is fun to to argue have made me babble too much in the past few days.
Back to being lurker. Thanks.
"Eliezer Yudkowsky facts" is meant to be fun and entertainment. Do you agree that there is a large subjective component to what a person will think is fun, and that different people will be amused by different types of jokes? Obviously many people did find the post amusing (judging from its 47 votes), even if you didn't. If those jokes were not posted, then something of real value would have been lost.
The situation with XiXiDu's post's is different because almost everyone seems to agree that it's bad, and those who voted it up did so only to "stimulate discussion". But if they didn't vote up XiXiDu's post, it's quite likely that someone would eventually write up a better post asking similar questions and generating a higher quality discussion, so the outcome would likely be a net improvement. Or alternatively, those who wanted to "stimulate discussion" could have just looked in the LW archives and found all the discussion they could ever hope for.
If almost everyone thought it's bad I would expect it to have much more downvotes than upvotes, even given the few people who voted it up to "stimulate discussion". But you probably know more about statistics than I do, so never mind.
Before or after the SIAI build a FAI? I waited half a decade for any of those questions to be asked in the first place.
Right, haven't thought about that! I'll be right back reading a few thousand comments to find some transparency.
This is true. You might also be able to think of jokes that aren't worth making even though a group of people would find then genuinely funny.
I agree with Aleksei about the Facts article.
Can you please explain why you think those jokes shouldn't have been made? I thought that making fun of authority figures is socially accepted in general, and in this case shows that we don't take Eliezer too seriously. Do you disagree?
Making him the subject of a list like that looks plenty serious to me.
Beyond that, I don't think there's much that I can say. There's a certain tone-deafness that's rubbing me wrong in both the post and in this discussion, but exactly how that works is not something that I know how to convey with a couple of paragraphs of text.
I have a theory: all the jokes parse out to "Eliezer is brilliant, and we have a bunch of esoteric in-jokes to show how smart we are". This isn't making fun of an authority figure.
This doesn't mean the article was a bad idea, or that I didn't think it was funny. I also don't think it's strong evidence that LW and SIAI aren't cults.
ETA: XiXiDu's comment that this is the community making fun of itself seems correct.
Ok, I think I have an explanation for what's going on here. Those of us "old hands" who went through the period where LW was OB, and Eliezer and Robin were the only main posters, saw Eliezer as initially having very high status, and considered the "facts" post as a fun way of taking him down a notch or two. Newcomers who arrived after LW became a community blog, on the other hand, don't have the initial high status in mind, and instead see that post as itself assigning Eliezer a very high status, which they see as unjustified/weird/embarrassing. Makes sense, right?
(Voted parent up from -1, btw. That kind of report seems useful, even if the commenter couldn't explain why he felt that way.)
You seemed to seriously imply that Eliezer didn't understand that the "facts" thread was a joke, while actually he was sarcastically joking by hinting at not getting the joke in the comment you replied to. I downvoted the comment to punish stupidity on LW (nothing personal, believe it or not, in other words it's a one-step decision based on the comment alone and not on impression made by your other comments). Wei didn't talk about that.
I guess after so many comments implying things I never meant to say I was a bit aggrieved. Never mind.