I don't think there's any point doing armchair diagnoses and accusing people of delusions of grandeur. I wouldn't go so far as to claim that Eliezer needs more self-doubt, in a psychological sense. That's an awfully personal statement to make publicly. It's not self-confidence I'm worried about, it's insularity.

Here's the thing. The whole SIAI project is not publicly affiliated with (as far as I've heard) other, more mainstream institutions with relevant expertise. Universities, government agencies, corporations. We don't have guest posts from Dr. X or Think Tank Fellow Y. The ideas related to friendly AI and existential risk have not been shopped to academia or evaluated by scientists in the usual way. So they're not being tested stringently enough.

It's speculative. It feels fuzzy to me -- I'm not an expert in AI, but I have some education in math, and things feel fuzzy around here.

If you want to claim you're working on a project that may save the world, fine. But there's got to be more to show for it, sooner or later, than speculative essays. At the very least, people worried about unfriendly AI will have to gather data and come up with some kind of statistical study that gives evidence of a threat! Look at climate science. For all the foibles and challenges of the climate change movement, those people actually gather data, create prediction models, predict the results of mitigating policies -- it works more or less like science.

If I'm completely off base here and SIAI is going to get to the science soon, I apologize, and I'll shut up about this for a while.

But look. All this advice about the "sin of underconfidence" is all very well (and actually I've taken it to heart somewhat.) But if you're going to go test your abilities, then test them. Against skeptics. Against people who'll look at you like you're a rotten fish if you don't have a graduate degree. Get something about FAI peer-reviewed or published by a reputable press. Show us something.

Sorry to be so blunt. It's just that I want this to be something. And I have my doubts because there's doesn't seem to be enough in this floating world in the way of unmistakable, concrete achievement.