wedrifid comments on Muehlhauser-Wang Dialogue - Less Wrong

24 Post author: lukeprog 22 April 2012 10:40PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (284)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: wedrifid 23 April 2012 08:51:20PM 2 points [-]

I think it'd be great if SIAI would not lath on the most favourable and least informative interpretation of any disagreement

The SIAI hasn't seemed to lath on any interpretations. The quote you make and all the interpretations you disagree with here have been done by commenters from the internet that aren't SIAI affiliated. The main thing Luke does that is a disservice to Wang is to post this conversation publicly, thereby embarrassing the guy and lowering his reputation among anyone who finds the reasoning expressed to be poor. But the conversation was supposed to be public and done with Wang's foreknowledge - presumably the arguments he used he actually wants to be associated with.

It'd be also great if Luke allowed for the possibility that Wang (and most other people whom are more intelligent, better educated, and more experienced than Luke) are actually correct, and Luke is completely wrong (or not even wrong).

As Grognor said (in the quote you made) this particular conversation served to significantly lower the perceived likelyhood that those things are correct. And this could become a real problem if it happens too often. Being exposed to too many bad arguments for a position can serve to bias the reader in the opposite direction to what has been argued. We need to find representatives from "mainstream AI researchers" that don't make the kind of simple errors of reasoning that we see here. Presumably they exist?