lukeprog comments on Procedural Knowledge Gaps - Less Wrong

126 Post author: Alicorn 08 February 2011 03:17AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (1477)
Tags: cooperation instrumental

Comments (1477)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: jsalvatier 08 February 2011 05:00:01PM 1 point [-]

What is it that you want to do with your life?

Comment author: lukeprog 08 February 2011 08:55:09PM 1 point [-]

Help solve the Friendly AI problem.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 08 February 2011 09:39:44PM 5 points [-]

How is "getting a Ph.D. in philosophy" (as a formal distinction) helpful to this goal? Purely as a source of funding? Attempt to stimulate academia from the inside to work on the problem?

Comment author: lukeprog 08 February 2011 09:48:35PM 3 points [-]

Vladimir,

Yes; both of those.

As a source of funding, because SIAI is only one institution, whereas there are hundreds of decent philosophy departments I could apply to, however scarce positions are.

As an attempt to stimulate academia, because I am slightly more optimistic than SIAI's staff that (a few) mainstream academics can contribute usefully to the project of designing Friendly AI.

Comment author: David_Gerard 08 February 2011 10:35:41PM *  0 points [-]

Every philosopher I've found of actual personal interest in the modern day has crossed it with science or engineering of some sort (cognitive psychology, AI, etc). If you want to do philiosophy because you have an actual problem to solve, you'll do something of interest and have a usefulness test to keep you on track.

Comment author: gwern 08 February 2011 11:01:50PM *  5 points [-]

"The degeneration of philosophical schools in its turn is the consequence of the mistaken belief that one can philosophize without having been compelled to philosophize by problems outside philosophy...
Genuine philosophical problems are always rooted outside philosophy & they die if these roots decay...
These roots are easily forgotten by philosophers who 'study' philosophy instead of being forced into philosophy by the pressure of nonphilosophical problems."

--Karl Popper, Conjectures & Refutations, (pages 95-97)

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit