BTW, if anyone wants to go to singinst.org and download the audio, you'll note that the actual event did not occur the exact way I remembered it, which should surprise no one here who knows anything about human memory. In particular, Cascio spontaneously provided the Genome Project example, rather than needing to be asked for it.
Generally, the reason I avoid identifying the characters in my examples is that it feels to me like I'm dumping all the sins of humankind upon their undeserving heads - I'm presenting one error, out of context, as exemplar for all the errors of this kind that have ever been committed, and showing none of the good qualities of the speaker - it would be like caricaturing them, if I called them by name.
That said, the reason why I picked this example is that, in fact, I was thinking of Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" while writing this post. And as Orwell said:
In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning.
If you simply issue a call for "democracy", why, no one can disagree with that - it would be like disagreeing with a call for apple pie. As soon as you propose a specific mechanism of democracy, whether it is Congress passing a law, or an AI polling people by phone, or government funding of a large research project whose final authority belongs to an appointed committee of eminent scientists, et cetera, people can disagree with that, because they can actually visualize the probable consequences.
So there is a tremendous motive to avoid criticism, to keep to the safely vague areas where people will applaud you, and not to make the concrete proposals where people might - gasp! - disagree.
Now I do not accuse you too much of this, because you did say "Genome Project" when challenged instead of squirting out an immense cloud of ink. But it is why I challenged you to define "democracy". I think that the real value in these discussions comes from people willing to make concrete proposals and expose themselves to criticism.
1Really bad example...
My impression is that democracy is seeing a sharp uptick in attacks from elites and intellectuals. There are many who now believe, e.g., that the US should be more like China (see: the success of Trump).
As the speaker noted, he expected his speech to be controversial in that crowd, and in a way, it was, as evidenced by this blog post :)
At the Singularity Summit 2007, one of the speakers called for democratic, multinational development of artificial intelligence. So I stepped up to the microphone and asked:
I wanted to find out whether he believed in the pragmatic adequacy of the democratic political process, or if he believed in the moral rightness of voting. But the speaker replied:
Confused, I asked:
The speaker replied:
I asked:
And the speaker said:
This exchange puts me in mind of a quote from some dictator or other, who was asked if he had any intentions to move his pet state toward democracy:
The substance of a democracy is the specific mechanism that resolves policy conflicts. If all groups had the same preferred policies, there would be no need for democracy—we would automatically cooperate. The resolution process can be a direct majority vote, or an elected legislature, or even a voter-sensitive behavior of an artificial intelligence, but it has to be something. What does it mean to call for a “democratic” solution if you don’t have a conflict-resolution mechanism in mind?
I think it means that you have said the word “democracy,” so the audience is supposed to cheer. It’s not so much a propositional statement or belief, as the equivalent of the “Applause” light that tells a studio audience when to clap.
This case is remarkable only in that I mistook the applause light for a policy suggestion, with subsequent embarrassment for all. Most applause lights are much more blatant, and can be detected by a simple reversal test. For example, suppose someone says:
If you reverse this statement, you get:
Since the reversal sounds abnormal, the unreversed statement is probably normal, implying it does not convey new information.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons for uttering a sentence that would be uninformative in isolation. “We need to balance the risks and opportunities of AI” can introduce a discussion topic; it can emphasize the importance of a specific proposal for balancing; it can criticize an unbalanced proposal. Linking to a normal assertion can convey new information to a bounded rationalist—the link itself may not be obvious. But if no specifics follow, the sentence is probably an applause light.
I am tempted to give a talk sometime that consists of nothing but applause lights, and see how long it takes for the audience to start laughing: