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selylindi comments on Checking Kurzweil's track record - Less Wrong
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Comments (53)
Is this true? It could be, or alternatively it could simply appear true from your perspective of familiarity. I'm only vaguely aware of Kurzweil and have never heard any mention of him among my group of largely grad student / geek friends.
I don't think it's true. I think it would be pretty easy to survey people and include some questions checking for technological awareness and Kurzweil awareness, and quietly discarding any results from people low on the former or high on the latter.
I mean, you could do it on Amazon Mechanical Turk! Such people are pretty technically sophisticated to be on Mechanical Turk in the first place, psychologists use it for surveys all the time, and a dismayingly large fraction of Turkers have college educations. It'd work fine.
We'll look into the Mechanical Turk angle...
http://www.kurzweilai.net/predictions/download.php
This contains all his predictions, it shouldn't be hard to verify them.
Self-assessment isn't a good idea. And I'm really not impressed by that one (though I shouldn't comment directly at this stage).
But we will see. I'll wait till I have all the data in.
I'm likewise vaguely aware of Kurzweil's reputation and accomplishments, and vaguely recall mention of a big prediction in the field of AI, a very optimistic one according to critics IIRC.
That's about the extent of it. I wasn't aware he had publicly made other predictions.
Problem is, how would one go about verifying this? Not to mention that if I wasn't already primed to not click the link, I would probably have immediately searched for the predictions in question just to know the subject under discussion.
On that note, thanks and good move Stuart, warning us beforehand about the spoiler/unblinding link.
I doubt it's true. I think it would be relatively easy to find technically sophisticated people who're unaware of Kurzweil's specific predictions; it'd be harder to find technically sophisticated people who're consistently unaware of his general thesis, but I'll bet you could still do it. You'd just need to look outside the transhumanist/singularitarian/AI enthusiast cluster.
Since those clusters are pretty tightly grouped in terms of conceptual underpinnings, it should be easy to filter them from a sample. Getting a good sample would be harder -- LW wouldn't do it, and personal blogs wouldn't either. Gwern's idea below looks promising but I have no idea how you'd go about it.
Interesting. My feeling was that it was hard to conceal that it was Kurzweil, and that people would certainly see that it was Kurzweil while googling their answers (also, we would get more interest with a semi-famous name).