I don't think what they teach will be particularly harmful to people's epistemic habits, but I don't think it'll be helpful either, and I think that there will be large selection effects for people who will, through sheer osmosis and association with the existent rationalist community, decide that it is "rational" to donate a lot of money to the Singularity Institute or work on decision theory. It seems that the Center for Modern Rationality aims to create a whole bunch of people at roughly the average LessWrong commenter level of prudence. LessWrong is pretty good relatively speaking, but I don't think their standards are nearly high enough to tackle serious problems in moral philosophy and so on that it might be necessary to solve in order to have any good basis for one's actions. I am disturbed by the prospect of an increasingly large cadre of people who are very gung-ho about "getting things done" despite not having a deep understanding of why those things might or might not be good things to do.
One of the most annoying arguments when discussing AI is the perennial "But if the AI is so smart, why won't it figure out the right thing to do anyway?" It's often the ultimate curiosity stopper.
Nick Bostrom has defined the "Orthogonality thesis" as the principle that motivation and intelligence are essentially unrelated: superintelligences can have nearly any type of motivation (at least, nearly any utility function-bases motivation). We're trying to get some rigorous papers out so that when that question comes up, we can point people to standard, and published, arguments. Nick has had a paper accepted that points out the orthogonality thesis is compatible with a lot of philosophical positions that would seem to contradict it.
I'm hoping to complement this with a paper laying out the positive arguments in favour of the thesis. So I'm asking you for your strongest arguments for (or against) the orthogonality thesis. Think of trying to convince a conservative philosopher who's caught a bad case of moral realism - what would you say to them?
Many thanks! Karma and acknowledgements will shower on the best suggestions, and many puppies will be happy.