I would guess they heard about it. maybe read a wiki article sometime, and that's all. Link a statement by either where they post about AI having a limitation? What else they have? I only see handwaving, mosty indicative of them not really even knowing the words they use. If they had degrees I would have to assume they probably, sometime in the past, have passed an exam (which is not a good evidence of competence either, but at least is something).
edit: To clarify. I do not refer to "research associates", see grandchild post.
Speaking of which, a couple days ago I noticed that a technobabble justification of atheism because theism fails "Solomonoff induction" which I seen before and determined to be complete idiocy (I am an atheist too) is by same Luke as at SIAI. Not only he doesn't know what Solomonoff induction is, he also lacks the wits to know he doesn't know.
He heard about it though, and uses it as technobabble slighty better than script writers would. Ultimately, SIAI people are very talented technobabble generators and that seem to be the extent of it. I'm not giving a slightest benefit of the doubt if I see that people do make technobabble. (I used to give in the past, which resulted in me reading sense into nonsense; because of ambiguity of human language, you can form sentences such that the statement is actually generated when one is reading your sentence, and you can do that without actually generating that statement yourself).
If you want to change my view, you better actually link some posts that are evidence for them knowing something instead of calling what i say a 'rant'.
If they had degrees I would have to assume they probably, sometime in the past, have passed an exam (which is not a good evidence of competence either, but at least is something).
I count only 1 out of 11 SIAI researcher not having a degree. (Paul Christiano's bio hasn't been updated yet, but he told me he just graduated from MIT). Click these links if you want to check for yourself.
...If you want to change my view, you better actually link some posts that are ev
I thought Ben Goertzel made an interesting point at the end of his dialog with Luke Muehlhauser, about how the strengths of both sides' arguments do not match up with the strengths of their intuitions:
What do we do about this disagreement and other similar situations, both as bystanders (who may not have strong intuitions of their own) and as participants (who do)?
I guess what bystanders typically do (although not necessarily consciously) is evaluate how reliable each party's intuitions are likely to be, and then use that to form a probabilistic mixture of the two sides' positions.The information that go into such evaluations could include things like what cognitive processes likely came up with the intuitions, how many people hold each intuition and how accurate each individual's past intuitions were.
If this is the best we can do (at least in some situations), participants could help by providing more information that might be relevant to the reliability evaluations, and bystanders should pay more conscious attention to such information instead of focusing purely on each side's arguments. The participants could also pretend that they are just bystanders, for the purpose of making important decisions, and base their beliefs on "reliability-adjusted" intuitions instead of their raw intuitions.
Questions: Is this a good idea? Any other ideas about what to do when strong intuitions meet weak arguments?
Related Post: Kaj Sotala's Intuitive differences: when to agree to disagree, which is about a similar problem, but mainly from the participant's perspective instead of the bystander's.