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TheOtherDave comments on Rationality Quotes: March 2011 - Less Wrong
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"It’s fascinating to me that we live in a world where some intelligent people think we need to put more effort into sophisticated artificial intelligence, while others think tractors powered by methane from manure are more important, and each thinks the other is being unrealistic."
John Baez
Very amusing, but what I find really silly here is that "tractors powered by methane from manure" is easy, and if that is helpful we should just do it already, and move on to hard important problems like FAI.
I suppose the counterargument is "put the large rocks in first"... that is, that there is a large enough supply of easy problems that the "if it's easy, do it now" strategy means you never get to the hard important problems.
In this case, the easy problem is still easy without using any resources currently being applied to the hard problem. There should not be a trade off here.
Do you happen to know where that quote is from? My dad uses it a lot and I had the vague impression it was from a self-help book.
I don't; it's been floating around the ether for as long as I can recall. Most recently, a friend of mine insisted that this was a Zen koan, which I find very unlikely.