Jed_Harris comments on Artificial Mysterious Intelligence - Less Wrong
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The arguments Eliezer describes are made, and his reactions are fair. But really the actual research community "grew out" of most of this stuff a while back. CYC and the "common sense" efforts were always a sideshow (in terms of research money and staff, not to mention results). Neural networks were a metonym for statistical learning for a while, then serious researchers figured out they needed to address statistical learning explicitly. Etc.
Admittedly there's always excessive enthusiasm for the current hot thing. A few years ago it was support vector machines, I'm not sure what now.
I recognize there's some need to deflate popular misconceptions, but there's also a need to move on and look at current work.
Eliezer, I'd be very interested in your comments on (what I regard as) the best current work. Examples for you to consider would be Sebastian Thrun, Andrew Ng (both in robotics at Stanford), Chris Manning (linguistics at Stanford), and the papers in the last couple of NIPS conferences (the word "Neural" in the conference title is just a fossil, don't have an allergic reaction).
As an entertaining side note, here's an abstract for a poster for NIPS '08 (happening tomorrow) that addresses the crossover between AI and ems:
This is a pretty good example of what I meant by "solving engineering problems" and it should help the ems program "cut corners".