= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
shminux comments on The genie knows, but doesn't care - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (515)
I'm afraid reading all that and giving a full response to either you or RobbBB isn't possible in the time I have available this weekend.
I agree that Eliezer is acting like a spoiled child, but calling people on their irrational interpersonal behavior within less wrong doesn't work. Calling them on mistakes they make about mathematics is fine, but calling them on how they treat others on less wrong will attract more reflexive down-votes from people who think you're contaminating their forum with emotion, than upvotes from people who care.
Eliezer may be acting rationally. His ultimate purpose in building this site is to build support for his AI project. The only people on LessWrong, AFAIK, with decades of experience building AI systems, mapping beliefs and goals into formal statements, and then turning them on and seeing what happens, are you, me, and Ben Goertzel. Ben doesn't care enough about Eliezer's thoughts in particular to engage with them deeply; he wants to talk about generic futurist predictions such as near-term and far-term timelines. These discussions don't deal in the complex, linguistic, representational, even philosophical problems at the core of Eliezer's plan (though Ben is capable of dealing with them, they just don't come up in discussions of AI fooms etc.), so even when he disagrees with Eliezer, Eliezer can quickly grasp his point. He is not a threat or a puzzle.
Whereas your comments are... very long, hard to follow, and often full of colorful or emotional statements that people here take as evidence of irrationality. You're expecting people to work harder at understanding them than they're going to. If you haven't noticed, reputation counts for nothing here. For all their talk of Bayesianism, nobody is going to check your bio and say, "Hmm, he's a professor of mathematics with 20 publications in artificial intellgence; maybe I should take his opinion as seriously as that of the high-school dropout who has no experience building AI systems." And Eliezer has carefully indoctrinated himself against considering any such evidence.
So if you consider that the people most likely to find the flaws in Eliezer's more-specific FAI & CEV plans are you and me, and that Eliezer has been public about calling both of us irrational people not worth talking with, this is consistent either with the hypothesis that his purpose is to discredit people who pose threats to his program, or with the hypothesis that his ego is too large to respond with anything other than dismissal to critiques that he can't understand immediately or that trigger his "crackpot" patter-matcher, but not with the hypothesis that arguing with him will change his mind.
(I find the continual readiness of people to assume that Eliezer always speaks the truth odd, when he's gone more out of his way than anyone I know, in both his blog posts and his fanfiction, to show that honest argumentation is not generally a winning strategy. He used to append a signature to his email along those lines, something about warning people not to assume that the obvious interpretation of what he said was the truth.)
RobbBB seems diplomatic, and I don't think you should quit talking with him because Eliezer made you angry. That's what Eliezer wants.
Actually, that was the first thing I did, not sure about other people. What I saw was:
Teaches at what appears to be a small private liberal arts college, not a major school.
Out of 20 or so publications listed on http://www.richardloosemore.com/papers, a bunch are unrelated to AI, others are posters and interviews, or even "unpublished", which are all low-confidence media.
Several contributions are entries in conference proceedings (are they peer-reviewed? I don't know) .
A number are listed as "to appear", and so impossible to evaluate.
A few are apparently about dyslexia, which is an interesting topic, but not obviously related to AI.
One relevant paper was in H+ magazine, a place I have never heard of before and apparently not a part of any well-known scientific publishing outlet, like Springer.
I could not find any external references to RL's work except through links to Ben Goertzel (IEET was one exception).
As a result, I was unable to independently evaluate RL's expertise level, but clearly he is not at the top of the AI field, unlike say, Ben Goertzel. Given his poorly written posts and childish behavior here, indicative of an over-inflated ego, I have decided that whatever he writes can be safely ignored. I did not think of him as a crackpot, more like a noise maker.
Admittedly, I am not sold on Eliezer's ideas, either, since many other AI experts are skeptical of them, and that's the only thing I can go by, not being an expert in the field myself. But at least Eliezer has done several impossible things in the last decade or so, which commands a lot of respect, while Richard appears to be drifting along.
Name three? If only so I can cite them to Eliezer-is-a-crank people.
I advise against doing that. It is unlikely to change anyone's mind.
By impossible feats I mean that a regular person would not be able to reproduce them, except by chance, like winning a lottery, starting Google, founding a successful religion or becoming a President.
He started as a high-school dropout without any formal education and look what he achieved so far, professionally and personally. Look at the organizations he founded and inspired. Look at the high-status experts in various fields (business, comp sci, programming, philosophy, math and physics) who take him seriously (some even give him loads of money). Heck, how many people manage to have multiple simultaneous long-term partners who are all highly intelligent and apparently get along well?
He's achieved about what Ayn Rand achieved, and almost everyone thinks she wasa crank.
Basically this. As Eliezer himself points out, humans aren't terribly rational on average and our judgements of each others' rationality isn't great either. Large amounts of support implies charisma, not intelligence.
TDT is closer to what I'm looking for, though it's a ... tad long.
Point, but there's also the middle ground "I'm not sure if he's a crank or not, but I'm busy so I won't look unless there's some evidence he's not."
The big two I've come up with is a) he actually changes his mind about important things (though I need to find an actual post I can cite - didn't he reopen the question of the possibility of a hard takeoff, or something?) and b) TDT.
Won some AI box experiments as the AI.
Sure, but that's hard to prove: given "Eliezer is a crank," the probability of "Eliezer is lying about his AI-box prowess" is much higher than "Eliezer actually pulled that off."
The latest success by a non-Eliezer person helps, but I'd still like something I can literally cite.
I don't see why anyone would think that. Plenty of people in the anti-vaccination crowd managed to convince parents to mortally endanger their children.
Yes, but that's really not that hard. For starters, you can do a better job of picking your targets.
The AI-box experiment often is run with intelligent, rational people with money on the line and an obvious right answer; it's a whole lot more impossible than picking the right uneducated family to sell your snake oil to.
Ohh, come on. Cyclical reasoning here. You think Yudkowsky is not a crank, so you think the folks that play that silly game with him are intelligent and rational (by the way a plenty of people who get duped by anti-vaxxers are of above average IQ), and so you get more evidence that Yudkowsky is not a crank. Cyclical reasoning doesn't persuade anyone who isn't already a believer.
You need non-cyclical reasoning. Which would generally be something where you aren't the one having to explain people that the achievement in question is profound.
This bit confuses me.
That aside:
Non sequitur. From the posts they make, everyone on this site seems to me to be sufficiently intelligent as to make "selling snake oil" impossible, in a cut-and-dry case like the AI box. Yudowsky's own credibility doesn't enter into it.
I thought you wanted to persuade others.
So what do you think even happened, anyway, if you think the obvious explanation is impossible?
Some folks on this site have accidentally bought unintentional snake oil in The Big Hoo Hah That Shall not Be Mentioned. Only an intelligent person could have bought that particular puppy,
But less than half of them, I'll wager. This is clearly an abuse of averages.
I wouldn't wager too much money on that one. http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/114/1/187.abstract .
And in any case the point is that any correlation between IQ and not being prone to getting duped like this is not perfect enough to deem anything particularly unlikely.
You probably mean "circular".
Also, maybe its a matter of semantics, but winning a game that you created isn't really 'doing the impossible' in the sense I took the phrasing.
Winning a game you created... that sounds as impossible to win as that?
In CS, conference papers are generally higher status & quality than journal articles.
At least a few of the RL authored papers are WITH Ben Goertzel, so some of Goertzel's status should rub-off, as I would trust Goertzel to effectively evaluate collaborators.
Is there some assumption here that association with Ben Goertzel should be considered evidence in favour of an individual's credibility on AI? That seems backwards.
Well, it does show that Goertzel respects his opinions at least enough to be willing to author a paper with him.
Goertzel appears to be a respected figuer in the field. Could you point the interested reader to your critique of his work?
Goertzel is also known for approving of people who are uncontroversially cranks. See here. It's also known, via his cooperation with MIRI, that a collaboration with him in no way implies his endorsement of another's viewpoints.
Comments can likely be found on this site from years ago. I don't recall anything particularly in depth or memorable. It's probably better to just look at things that Ben Goertzel says and making one's own judgement. The thinking he expresses is not of the kind that impresses me but other's mileage may vary.
I don't begrudge anyone their right to their beauty contests but I do observe that whatever it is that is measured by identifying the degree of affiliation with Ben Goertzel is something wildly out of sync with the kind of thing I would consider evidence of credibility.
That is a very interesting assessment, shminux.
Would you be up for some feedback?
You are quite selective in your catalog of my achievements....
One item was a chapter in a book entitled "Theoretical Foundations of Artificial General Intelligence". Sure, it was about the consciousness question, but still.
You make a casual disparaging remark about the college where I currently work ... but forget to mention that I graduated from an institution that is ranked in the top 3 or 4 in the world (University College London).
You neglect to mention that I have academic qualifications in multiple fields -- both physics and artificial intelligence/cognitive psychology. I now teach in both of those fields.
And in addition to all of the above, you did not notice that I am (in addition to my teaching duties) an AI developer who works on his projects WITHOUT intending to publish that work all the time! My AI work is largely proprietary. What you see from the outside are the occasional spinoffs and side projects that get turned into published writings. Not to be too coy, but isn't that something you would expect from someone who is actually walking the walk....? :-)
There are a number of comments from other people below about Ben Goertzel, some of them a little strange. I wrote a paper a couple of years ago that Ben suggested we get together to and publish... that is now a chapter in the book "Singularity Hypotheses".
So clearly Ben Goertzel (who has a large, well-funded AGI lab) is not of the opinion that I am a crank. Could I get one point for that?
Phil Goetz, who is an experienced veteran of the AGI field, has on this thread made a comment to the effect that he thinks that Ben Goertzel, himself, and myself are the three people Eliezer should be seriously listening to (since the three of us are among the few people who have been working on this problem for many years, and who have active AGI projects). So perhaps that is two points? Maybe?
And, just out of curiosity, I would invite you to check in with the guy who invented AIXI -- Marcus Hutter. He and I met and had a very long discussion at the 2009 AGI conference. Marcus and I disagree substantially about the theoretical foundations of AI, but in spite of that disagreement I would urge you to ask him if he considers me to be down at the crank level. I might be wrong, but I do not think he would be willing to give me a bad reference. Let me know how that goes, yes?
You also finished off with what I can only describe as one of the most bizarre comparisons I have ever seen. :-) You say "Eliezer has done several impossible things in the last decade or so". Hmmmm....! :-) And yet ... "Richard appears to be drifting along" Well, okay, if you say so .... :-)
I was in a rush last night, shminux, so I didn't have time for a couple of other quick clarifications:
First, you say "One relevant paper was in H+ magazine, a place I have never heard of before and apparently not a part of any well-known scientific publishing outlet, like Springer."
Well, H+ magazine is one of the foremost online magazines (perhaps THE foremost online magazine) of the transhumanist community.
And, you mention Springer. You did not notice that one of my papers was in the recently published Springer book "Singularity Hypotheses".
Second, you say "A few [of my papers] are apparently about dyslexia, which is an interesting topic, but not obviously related to AI."
Actually they were about dysgraphia, not dyslexia ... but more importantly, those papers were about computational models of language processing. In particular they were very, VERY simple versions of the computational model of human language that is one of my special areas of expertise. And since that model is primarily about learning mechanisms (the language domain is only a testbed for a research programme whose main focus is learning), those papers you saw were actually indicative that back in the early 1990s I was already working on the construction of the core aspects of an AI system.
So, saying "dyslexia" gives a very misleading impression of what that was all about. :-)