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DaFranker comments on Reply to Holden on The Singularity Institute - Less Wrong
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Nice try. You've almost succeeded at summarizing practically all the relevant arguments against the SI initiative that have already been refuted. Notice the last part there that says "have already been refuted".
Each of the assertions you make are ones that members of the SI have already adressed and refuted. I'd take the time to decompose your post into a list of assertions and give you links to the particular articles and posts where those arguments were taken down, but I believe this would be an unwise use of my time.
It would, at any rate, be much simpler to tell you to at least read the articles on the Facing the Singularity site, which are a good vulgarized introduction to the topic. In particular, the point of timescale overestimates is clearly adressed there, as is that of the "complexity" of human intelligence.
I'd like to also indicate that you are falsely overcomplexifying the activity of the human brain. There are no such things as "numerous small regions" that "run programs" or "communicate". These are interpretations of patterns within the natural events, which are simply, first and foremost, a huge collection of neurons sending signals to other neurons, each with its own unique set of links to particular other neurons and a domain of nearby neurons to which it could potentially link itself. This is no different from the old core sequence article here on LessWrong where Eliezer talks about how reality doesn't actually follow the rules of aerodynamics to move air around a plane - it's merely interactions of countless tiny [bits of something] on a grand scale, with each tiny [bit of something] doing its own thing, and nowhere along the entire process do the formulae we use for aerodynamics get "solved" to decide where one of the [bits of something] must go.
Anyway, I'll cut myself short here - I doubt any more deserves to be said on this. If you are willing to learn and question yourself, and actually want to become a better rationalist and obtain more correct beliefs, the best way to start is to go read some of the articles that are already on LessWrong and actually read the material on the Singinst.org website, most of which is very readable even without prior technical knowledge or experience.
I don't pretend I've read every refutation of Aeonios's arguments that's out there, but I've read a few. Generally, those "refutations" strike me as plausible arguments by smart people, but far from bulletproof. Thus, I think that your [DaFranker's] attitude of "I know better so I barely have time for this" isn't the best one.
(I'm sorry, I don't have time to get into the details of the arguments themselves, so this post is all meta. I realize that that's somewhat hypocritical, but "hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue" so I'm OK with that.)
Indeed, most of them are nothing but smart arguments by smart people, and have not been formally proven. However, none of the arguments for anything in AI research is formally proven, except for some very primitive mathematics and computer science stuff. Basically, at the moment all we have to go on is a lot of thought, some circumstantial "evidence" and our sets of beliefs.
All I'm saying is that, if you watch the trend, it's much more likely (with my priors, at least) that the S.I. is "right" and that the arguments that keep being brought against it are unenlightened, in light of a few key observables; each argument against S.I. being "refuted" one after another historically, most of the critics of the S.I. not having spent nearly as much time thinking about the issues at hand and actually researching AIs, etc.
It's not that I know better, merely that with the evidence presented to me from "both sides" (if one were to arbitrarily delimit two specific opposing factions, for simplification) and my own knowledge of the world seem to indicate towards the "S.I. side" having propositions which are much more likely to be true. I'll admit that the end result does project that attitude, but this is mainly incidental from the fact that I actually was pressed for time when I wrote that particular post, and I did believe true that it be pointless to discuss and argument further for the benefit of an outsider that hadn't yet read the relevant material on the topic at hand.
But in this case, "more likely to be true" means something like "a good enough argument to move my priors by roughly an order of magnitude, or two at the outside". Since in the face of our ignorance of the future, reasonable priors could differ by several orders of magnitude, even the best arguments I've seen aren't enough to dismiss any "side" as silly or not worthy of further consideration (except stuff that was obviously silly to begin with).
That's a very good point.
I was intuitively tempted to retort a bunch of things about likelyness of exception and information taken into consideration, but I realized before posting that I was actually falling victim to several biases in that train of thought. You've actually given me a new way to think of the issue. I'm still of the intuition that any new way to think about it will only reinforce my beliefs and support the S.I. over time, though.
For now, I'm content to concede that I was weighing too heavily on my priors and my confidence in my own knowledge of the universe (on which my posteriors for AI issues inevitably depend, in one way or another), among possibly more mistakes. However, it seems at first glance to be even more evidence for the need of a new mathematical or logical language to discuss these questions more in depth, detail and formality.