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linkhyrule5 comments on The genie knows, but doesn't care - Less Wrong
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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on http://www.richardloosemore.com/papers, a bunch are unrelated to AI, others are posters and interviews, or even "unpublished", which are all low-confidence media.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?
Yes, but I don't see why this is relevant
Ah, sorry. This brand of 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,
Granted. And it may be that additional knowledge/intelligence makes yourself more vulnerable a Gatekeeper.
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.
Hmm. Yeah, that's hardly conclusive, but I think I was actually failing to update there. Now that you mention it, I seem to recall that both conspiracy theorists and cult victims skew toward higher IQ. I was clearly quite overconfident there.
Wasn't the point that
wasn't enough, actually? That seems like a much stronger claim than "it's really hard to fool high-IQ people".
I imagine that says more about the demographics of the general New Age belief cluster than it does about any special IQ-based appeal of vaccination skepticism.
There probably are some scams or virulent memes that prey on insecurities strongly correlated with high IQ, though. I can't think of anything specific offhand, but the fringes of geek culture are probably one of the better places to start looking.
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?