= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Furcas comments on Should I believe what the SIAI claims? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (600)
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.
Although I personally don't care much if I'm called stupid, if I think it is justified, I doubt this attitude is very appealing to most people.
Where do you draw the line between being stupid and simply uneducated or uninformed?
I've never read up on their program in the first place. When thinking about turning those comments the OP is based on into a top-level post I have been pondering much longer about the title than the rest of what I said until I became too lazy and simply picked the SIAI as punching bag to direct my questions at. I thought it would sufficiently work to steer some emotions. But after all that was most of what it did accomplish, rather than some answers.
What I really was on about was the attitude of many people here, especially regarding the posts related to the Roko-deletion-incident. I was struck by the apparent impact it had. It was not just considered to be worth sacrificing freedom of speech for it but people, including some working for the SIAI, actually had nightmares and suffered psychological trauma. I think I understood the posts and comments, as some told me over private message after inquiring about my knowledge, but however couldn't believe that something that far would be considered to be reasonably evidence-based to be worried to such an extent.
But inquiring about that would have turned the attention back to the relevant content. And after all I wanted to find out if such reactions are justified before deciding to spread the content anyway.
You admit you've never bothered to read up on what SIAI is about in the first place. Don't be surprised if people don't have the best possible attitude if despite this you want them to spend a significant amount of time explaining to you personally the very same content that is already available but you just haven't bothered to read.
Might as well link again the one page that I recommend as the starting point in getting to know what it is exactly that SIAI argues:
http://singinst.org/riskintro/index.html
I also think it's weird that you've actually donated money to SIAI, despite not having really looked into what it is about and how credible the arguments are. I personally happen to think that SIAI is very much worth supporting, but there doesn't seem to be any way how you could have known that before making your donations, and so it's just luck that it actually wasn't a weird cult that your way of making decisions lead you to give money to.
(And part of the reason I'm being this blunt with you is that I've formed the impression that you won't take it in a very negative way, in the way that many people would. And on a personal level, I actually like you, and think we'd probably get along very well if we were to meet IRL.)
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.