timtyler comments on Why AI may not foom - Less Wrong

23 Post author: John_Maxwell_IV 24 March 2013 08:11AM

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Comment author: timtyler 24 March 2013 11:58:23PM *  4 points [-]

A point against there being important, chunky undiscovered insights in to intelligence is that if there were such insights, they'd likely be simple, and if they'd be simple, they likely would have been discovered already. So the fact that no one has yet discovered any such brilliant, simple idea is evidence against them existing.

We can't consider "chunky undiscovered insights in to intelligence" - and then argue that they don't exist because they would have already been discovered. We can't have already discovered "undiscovered insights" - and we have certainly discovered plenty of big insights already. The problem is not so much that big insights don't exist, it is more that we seem to have discovered a lot of them already.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 27 March 2013 09:04:39PM 0 points [-]

Sure, it doesn't sound like we disagree on anything.

Might be interesting to try to plot the number of big insights made per year to see if they were trailing off yet or not. One potential problem would be figuring out whether a recent insight was going to end up being "big" or not.