NancyLebovitz comments on The Sheer Folly of Callow Youth - Less Wrong

24 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 19 September 2008 01:30AM

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Comment author: JJ10DMAN 14 November 2010 08:04:56AM 0 points [-]

If anyone can give me the cliff's notes to this, I'd be appreciative. I am a big LW fan but aside from the obsession with the Singularity, I more or less stand at Eliezer1997's mode of thinking. Furthermore, making clever plans to work around the holes in your thinking seems like the wholly rational thing to do - in fact, this entire post seems like a direct counterargument to The Proper Use of Doubt: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ib/the_proper_use_of_doubt/

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 14 November 2010 09:18:04AM 4 points [-]

I think (and I'm not doing a short version of Eliezer's essay because I can't do it justice) that part of what's going on is that people have to make decisions based on seriously incomplete information all the time, and do. People build and modify governments, get married, and build bridges, all without a deep understanding of people or matter-- and they need to make those decisions. There's enough background knowledge and a sufficiently forgiving environment that there's an adequate chance of success, and some limitation to the size of disasters.

What Eliezer missed in 1997 was that AI was a special case which could only be identified by applying much less optimism than is appropriate for ordinary life.