army1987 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: [deleted] 18 May 2012 09:31:15AM 0 points [-]

My estimate for an actual random person on the Internet building AGI in, say, the next decade, has a ceiling of e-10 or so, but I don't have a clue what its lower bound is.

(I had to read that three times before getting why that number was 1000 times smaller than the other one, because I kept on misinterpreting “random person”. Try “randomly-chosen person”.)

Comment author: TheOtherDave 18 May 2012 02:31:51PM 0 points [-]

I have no idea what you understood "random person" to mean, if not randomly chosen person. I'm also curious now as to whether whatever-that-is is what EY meant in the first place.

Comment author: [deleted] 18 May 2012 02:52:55PM *  0 points [-]

A stranger, esp. one behaving in weird ways; this appears to me to be the most common meaning of that word in 21st-century English when applied to a person. (Older speakers might be unfamiliar with it, but the median LWer is 25 years old, as of the latest survey.) And I also had taken the indefinite article to be an existential quantifier; hence, I had effectively interpreted the statement as “at least one actual strange person on the Internet building AGI in the next decade”, for which I thought such a low probability would be ridiculous.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 18 May 2012 03:06:34PM 0 points [-]

Thanks for clarifying.