fubarobfusco comments on Self-skepticism: the first principle of rationality - Less Wrong

36 Post author: aaronsw 06 August 2012 12:51AM

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

Comments (105)

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

Comment author: Jonathan_Graehl 06 August 2012 02:05:28AM 0 points [-]

I hope SI will agree that the FAQ answer you linked is inadequate (either overlooking some common objections, or lumping them together dismissively as unspecified obstacles that will be revealed in the future). For example, "building an AI seems hard. no human (even given much longer lifespans) or team of humans will ever be smart enough to build something that leads to an intelligence explosion", or "computing devices that can realistically model an entire human brain (even taking shortcuts on parts that turn out to be irrelevant to intelligence) will be prohibitively expensive and slow" are both plausible.

And yes, even if the answer is improved, it does suggest a possible pattern. It could just be a lack of resources available to create high quality, comprehensive answers to objections. Or it could be that SI is slightly more like Uri Geller in not doubting itself than GiveWell is.

Is GiveWell really doubting itself or its premise - that it's worth spending extra money evaluating where to give money? (actually, I think it is worth it, but that's not my point).

Comment author: fubarobfusco 06 August 2012 03:48:21AM 2 points [-]

Is GiveWell really doubting itself or its premise - that it's worth spending extra money evaluating where to give money?

That would be a cost-of-information question, which is really quite tricky. For instance, one might ask "Which of these charities would we prefer based on the amount of data we already have?" and then go and gather more data and see if the earlier data was actually sufficiently predictive, or some such ....