Rain comments on Why We Can't Take Expected Value Estimates Literally (Even When They're Unbiased) - Less Wrong

75 Post author: HoldenKarnofsky 18 August 2011 11:34PM

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Comment author: Rain 21 August 2011 02:08:28PM 10 points [-]

It's hardly fair to blame the reader when you've got "sentences" like this:

I think that my original comment was at roughly the most accurate and honest level of vagueness (i.e. "aimed largely [i.e. primarily] at doing the technical analysis necessary to determine as well as possible the feasibility and difficulty [e.g. how many Von Neumanns, Turings, and/or Aristotles would it take?] of Friendly AI for various (logical) probabilities of Friendliness [e.g. is the algorithm meta-reflective enough to fall into (one of) some imagined Friendliness attractor basin(s)?]").

Comment author: Will_Newsome 21 August 2011 02:19:24PM 0 points [-]

That was the second version of the sentence, the first one had much clearer syntax and even italicized the answer to Eliezer's subsequent question. It looks the way it does because Eliezer apparently couldn't extract meaning out of my original sentence despite it clearly answering his question, so I tried to expand on the relevant points with bracketed concrete examples. Here's the original:

If I had a viable preliminary Friendly AI research program, aimed largely at doing the technical analysis necessary to determine as well as possible the feasibility and difficulty of Friendly AI for various values of "Friendly" [...]

(emphasis in original)

Comment author: Rain 21 August 2011 03:58:56PM *  2 points [-]

Which starts with the word 'if' and fails to have a 'then'.

If you took out 'If I had' and replaced it with 'I would create', then maybe it would be more in line with what you're trying to say?