I really appreciate this response. In fact, to mirror Jordan's pattern I'll say that this comment has done more to raise my confidence in SIAI than anything else in the recent context.

I'll solve your math problems if I can, I'll build Friendly AI for you if I can, if you think SIAI needs some kind of amazing PR person, give us enough money to hire one

I'm working on it, to within the limits of my own entrepreneurial ability and the costs of serving my own personal mission. Not that I would allocate such funds to a PR person. I would prefer to allocate it to research of the 'publish in traditional journals' kind. If I was in the business of giving advice I would give the same advice you have no doubt heard 1,000 times: the best thing that you personally could do for PR isn't to talk about SIAI but to get peer reviewed papers published. Even though academia is far from perfect, riddled with biases and perhaps inclined to have a certain resistance to your impingement it is still important.

or better yet, why don't you try being perfect and see whether it's as easy as it sounds while you're handing out advice?

Now, now, I think the 'give us the cash' helps you out rather a lot more than me being perfect. Mind you me following tsuyoku naritai does rather overlap with the 'giving you cash'.

I have looked, and I have seen under the Sun, that to those who try to defend themselves, more and more attacks will be given. Like, if you try to defend yourself, people sense that as a vulnerability, and they know they can demand even more concessions from you. I tried to avoid that failure mode in my responses, and apparently failed.

You are right on all counts. I'll note that it perhaps didn't help that you felt it was a time to defend rather than a time to assert and convey. It certainly isn't necessary to respond to criticism directly. Sometimes it is better to just take the feedback into consideration and use anything of merit when working out your own strategy. (As well as things that aren't of merit but are still important because you have to win over even stupid people).

I'll build a Friendly AI for you if I can.

Thankyou. I don't necessarily expect you to succeed because the task is damn hard, takes longer to do right than for someone else to fail and we probably only have one shot to get it right. But you're shutting up to do the impossible. Even if the odds are against us targeting focus at the one alternative that doesn't suck is the sane thing to do.

It was very clearly a mistake to have participated in this thread in the first place. It always is. Every single time. Other SIAI supporters who are better at that sort of thing can respond. I have to remember, now, that there are other people who can respond, and that there is no necessity for me to do it.

Yes.

In fact, someone really should have reminded me to shut up, and if it happens again, I hope someone will.

I will do so, since you have expressed willingness to hear it. That is an option I would much prefer to criticising any responses you make that I don't find satisfactory. You're trying to contribute to saving the goddam world and have years of preparation behind you in some areas that nobody has. You can free yourself up to get on with that while someone else explains how you can be useful.

I wish I could pull a Roko and just delete all my comments in all these threads, but that would be impolite.

The sentiment is good but perhaps you could have left off the reminder of the Roko incident. The chips may have fallen somewhat differently in these threads if the ghost of Nearly-Headless Roko wasn't looming in the background.

Once again, this was an encouraging reply. Thankyou.