private_messaging comments on Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI) - Less Wrong

256 Post author: HoldenKarnofsky 11 May 2012 04:31AM

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Comment author: private_messaging 17 May 2012 08:14:49AM *  5 points [-]

It is so hard to find good critics.

if you don't have a good argument you won't find good critics. (Unless you are as influential as religion. Then you can get good critic simply because you stepped onto good critic's foot. The critic probably ain't going to come to church to talk about it though, and also the ulterior motives (having had foot stepped onto) may make you qualify it as bad critic).

Much of this has to do with the fact that SI hasn't been very clear about many of its positions and arguments

When you look through a matte glass, and you see some blurred text that looks like it got equations in it, and you are told that what you see is a fuzzy image of proof that P!=NP (maybe you can make out the headers which are in bigger font, and those look like the kind of headers that valid proof might have), do you assume that it is really a valid proof, and they only need to polish the glass? What if it is P=NP instead? What if it doesn't look like it got equations in it?