That sounds like you are trying to rouse anger, or expressing a personal dislike, but not much like an argument.
The AI-box experiments have the flavor of (and presumably are inspired by) the Turing test - you could equally have accused Turing at the time of being "unscientific" in that he had proposed an experiment that hadn't even been performed and would not be for many years. Yes, they are a conceptual rather than a scientific experiment.
The point of the actual AI-box demonstration isn't so much to "prove" something, in the sense of demonstrating a particular exploitable regularity of human behaviour that a putative UFAI could use to take over people's brains over a text link (though that would be nice to have). Rather, it is that prior to the demonstration one would have assigned very little probability to the proposition "Eliezer role-playing an AI will win this bet".
As such, I'd agree that they "prove little" but they do constitute evidence.
I'd agree that they "prove little" but they do constitute evidence.
They constitute anecdotal evidence. Such evidence is usually considered to be pretty low-grade by scientists.
Basically this: "Eliezer Yudkowsky writes and pretends he's an AI researcher but probably hasn't written so much as an Eliza bot."
While the Eliezer S. Yudkowsky site has lots of divulgation articles and his work on rationality is of indisputable value, I find myself at a loss when I want to respond to this. Which frustrates me very much.
So, to avoid this sort of situation in the future, I have to ask: What did the man, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, actually accomplish in his own field?
Please don't downvote the hell out of me, I'm just trying to create a future reference for this sort of annoyance.