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

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

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

Comments (1270)

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

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.