brynema, “disrespect” isn’t at all the the right axis for understanding why your last couple comments weren’t helpful. (I’m not attacking you here; LW is an unusual place, and understanding how to usefully contribute takes time. You’ve been doing well.) The trouble with your last two comments is mostly:

1. Comments on LW should aspire to rationality. As part of this aspiration, we basically shouldn’t have “positions” on issues we haven’t thought much about; the beliefs we share here should be evidence-based best-guesses about the future, not clothes to decorate ourselves with.

   Many places encourage people to make up and share “beliefs”, because any person’s beliefs are as good as any other’s and it’s good to express oneself, or something like that. Those norms are not useful toward arriving at truth, at least not compared to what we usually manage on LW. Not even if people follow their made-up “beliefs” with evidence created to support their conclusions; nor even if evidence or intuitions play some role in the initial forming of beliefs.

   This is particularly true in cases where the subjects are difficult technical problems that some in the community have specialized in and thought carefully about; declaring positions there is kind of like approaching a physicist, without knowledge of physics, and announcing your “position” on how atoms hold together. (Though less so, since AI is less well-grounded than physics.)

2. AI risks are a particularly difficult subject about which to have useful conversation, mostly because there is little data to help keep conversation from veering off into nonsense-land. So it makes sense, in discussing AI risks and other slippery topics, to have lower tolerance for folks making up positions.

   Also, yes, these particular positions have been discussed and have proven un-workable in pretty exhaustive detail.

As to the object-level issue concerning possible minds, I wrote an answer in the welcome thread, on the theory that, if we want to talk about AI or other prerequisite-requiring topics on LW, we should probably get in the habit of taking “already discussed to death” questions to the welcome thread, where they won’t clutter mainline discussion. Please don’t be offended by this, though; I value your presence here, and you had no real way of knowing this had already been discussed.

If we want to talk usefully about AI as a community, we should probably make a wiki page that summarizes or links to the main points. And then we should have a policy in certain threads: "don't comment here unless you've read the links off of wiki page such-and-such".

brynema's right that we want newcomers in LW, and that newcomers can't be expected to know all of what's been discussed. But it is also true that we'll never get discussions off the ground if we have to start all over again every time someone new enters.