but resents that poets and artists are specifically called on to do so, apparently because he sees that as reducing their humanity to mere titles.
I understood the rest of your comment, but I don't understand this part. I, for example, am a software engineer. If SIAI wanted me to write some sort of an AI-management console for them, I would gladly do it. I don't think this would "reduce my humanity to a mere title". Acknowledging that my particular skills are well-suited to writing AI consoles, and poorly suited to, say, writing poems, does not somehow objectify me. No one can be good at everything, after all (at least, not in our pre-Singularity world).
So... are artists somehow fundamentally different from software engineers in this respect ?
I agree with you. I don't think calling on poets and artists to be poetic and artistic is a problem, I was just interpreting what I thought Eliezer was saying.
Personally, I think Eliezer was actually offended by the idea that non-poets and non-artists cannot be poetic and artistic, i.e. we need poets and artists because these Computer Science/Math people can't express themselves without equations.
But I'm making some big assumptions here, so I could have misread the whole thing.
Today's post, We Don't Really Want Your Participation was originally published on 10 September 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Radical Honesty, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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