EY was influenced by E.T. Jaynes, who was really against neural networks, in favor of bayesian networks. He thought NNs were unprincipled and not mathematically elegant, and bayes nets were. I see the same opinions in some of EY's writings, like the one you link. And the general attitude that "non-elegant = bad" is basically MIRI's mission statement.
I don't agree with this at all. I wrote a thing here about how NNs can be elegant, and derived from first principles. But more generally, AI should use whatever works. If that happens to be "scruffy" methods, then so be it.
But more generally, AI should use whatever works. If that happens to be "scruffy" methods, then so be it.
This seems like a bizarre statement if we care about knowable AI safety. Near as I can tell, you just called for the rapid creation of AGI that we can't prove non-genocidal.
There have been a couple of brief discussions of this in the Open Thread, but it seems likely to generate more so here's a place for it.
The original paper in Nature about AlphaGo.
Google Asia Pacific blog, where results will be posted. DeepMind's YouTube channel, where the games are being live-streamed.
Discussion on Hacker News after AlphaGo's win of the first game.