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XiXiDu comments on Q&A with new Executive Director of Singularity Institute - Less Wrong
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Comments (177)
I think that it does convey quite a lot information. I already know that people associated with SI and LW accept a lot of strategic thinking that would be considered everything from absurd to outright psychopathic within different circles. If she says that the strategies they explore would even alienate some people associated with LW, let alone SI, then that's really bad.
I think you underestimate the amount of information that a natural language sentence can carry and signal.
It is abundantly clear that SI is really bad at PR. I assign a high probability to the possibility that her and other members of the SI are revealing a lot of what is going on behind the scenes by being careless about their communication.
I disagree. LWers have a range of opinions on AI & the singularity (yes, those opinions are less diverse than the general population's, but I don't see them being sufficiently less diverse for your argument to go through). There are already quite a few LWers who're SI sceptics to a degree. I'm also sure there are LWers who, at the moment, basically agree with SI but would spurn it if it announced a more specific strategy for handling AI/the singularity. I think this would be true for most possible strategies SI could announce. I'd expect the same basic argument to hold for SI (though I'm less sure because I know less about SI).
Quite possible! But in any case, a sentence can carry lots of information about one thing, but not another. One has to look at the probability of a sentence or claim conditional on a specific thing. As I see it, P(AS says some people would be alienated | SI has a terrible secret strategy) is about equal to P(AS says some people would be alienated | SI has an un-terrible secret strategy), so the likelihood ratio is about one, and AnnaSalamon's belief discriminates poorly between those two particular hypotheses.
Plausible, but I doubt it's true for this specific example.
Blah blah blah...full stop. We're talking about the communication of primates with other primates. Evolution honed your skills to detect the intention and possible bullshit in the output of other primates. Use your intuition!
I am not sure what you are getting at. If she thinks that there are strategies that should be kept secrete for political reasons or whatever and admits it, that's bad from any possible viewpoint.
I have. My gut didn't raise a red flag when I read AnnaSalamon's post, but it did when I read yours.
I was giving a reason for my claim that there'd be someone on LW/in SI who'd be alienated by all but the blandest of strategies.
Maybe she thinks that and maybe she doesn't, but either way she didn't admit it. (At least not in the post I'm talking about. I haven't read AS's whole comment history.)
To my intuitions you sound exactly like a bitter excluded nobody attacking someone successful and popular. You DON'T talk like someone who sees through the lies of an evil greedy deceiver and honestly wants people to examine what he says and come to the correct opinion.
If I was to accept your estimation then the associated utility of P(people alienated | terrible strategy) and P(people alienated | un-terrible strategy) would force you to act according to the first possibility.
I don't follow. Do you mean that the potential disutility of SI having a terrible strategy is so much bigger than the potential utility of SI having an un-terrible strategy that, given equal likelihoods, I should act against SI? If so, I disagree.