vi21maobk9vp comments on Open thread, October 2011 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: MarkusRamikin 02 October 2011 09:05AM

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Comment author: vi21maobk9vp 03 October 2011 09:21:17AM 2 points [-]

It is not a fully general counterargument because only if FAI approach is right it is a good idea to suppress open dissemination of some AGI information.

Comment author: wedrifid 03 October 2011 10:01:01AM 3 points [-]

It is not a fully general counterargument because only if FAI approach is right it is a good idea to suppress open dissemination of some AGI information.

That isn't true. It would be a good idea to suppress some AGI information if the FAI approach is futile and any creation of AGI would turn out to be terrible.

Comment author: lessdazed 03 October 2011 09:42:17AM 3 points [-]

information

It's a general argument to avoid considering whether or not something even is information in a relevant sense.

I'm willing to accept "If you are wrong, it is good that papers showing how you are wrong are published," but not "If you are right, there is no harm done by any arguments against your position," nor "If you are wrong, there is benefit to any argument about AI so long as it differs from yours."

Comment author: vi21maobk9vp 03 October 2011 01:38:40PM 1 point [-]

Well, I mean more specific case. FAI approach, among other things, presupposes that building FAI is very hard and in the meantime it is better to divert random people from AGI to specialized problem-solving CS fields. Or into game theory / decision theory.

Superficially, he references some things that are reasonable; he also implies some other things that are considered too hard to estimate (and so unreliable) on LessWrong.

If someone tries to make sense of it, she either builds a sensible decision theory out of these references (not entirely excluded), follows the references to find both FAI and game-theoretical results that may be useful, or fails to make any sense (the suppression case I mentioned) and decides that AGI is a freak field.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 03 October 2011 02:03:34PM 2 points [-]

FAI approach

Talk of "approaches" in AI has a similar insidious effect to that of "-ism"s of philosophy, compartmentalizing (motivation for) projects from the rest of the field.

Comment author: jsalvatier 03 October 2011 02:45:27PM 3 points [-]

That's an interesting idea. Would you share some evidence for that? (anecdotes or whatever). I sometimes think in terms of a 'bayesian approach to statistics'.

Comment author: lessdazed 03 October 2011 04:57:04PM 0 points [-]

I think the "insidious effect" exists and isn't always a bad thing.

Comment author: wedrifid 03 October 2011 10:13:47AM 1 point [-]

Another way to put it is that it is a fully general counterargument against having standards. ;)