As Risto Saarelma pointed out on IRC, "Volcano Lair Doom Institute" would have been cooler, but this is pretty good too. As the word "Singularity" has pretty much lost its meaning, it's better to have a name that doesn't give a new person all kinds of weird initial associations as their first impression.And "Machine Intelligence Research Institute" is appropriately descriptive while still being general enough.
I personally dislike the change, but I trust that you guys have changed your names for a reason. I think I may be reacting negatively due to the nostalgia factor.
Reversal test: if it were always called MIRI and just now decided to change its name to SIAI, how would you feel about it? (This isn't quite the right test because maintaining the same name over time does have some value, but it might help.)
http://singularity.org/blog/2013/01/30/we-are-now-the-machine-intelligence-research-institute-miri/
As Risto Saarelma pointed out on IRC, "Volcano Lair Doom Institute" would have been cooler, but this is pretty good too. As the word "Singularity" has pretty much lost its meaning, it's better to have a name that doesn't give a new person all kinds of weird initial associations as their first impression. And "Machine Intelligence Research Institute" is appropriately descriptive while still being general enough.