They sit together in circle and think - okay, we lost a donor because of the name, let's change the name, let's come up with a good name. Never mind descriptiveness, never mind not trying to mislead, never mind that the cause of the loss was the name being descriptive. That's called swindling people out of their money. Especially if you go ahead and try to interfere with how it is to be evaluated, to eliminate the possibility that 'if researchers are cranks we won't get money because researchers will demonstrate themselves to be cranks'. Anyone asks me if it's worth donating there, I'll tell, no, it's just some bunch of sociopaths whom sat in circle and thought how to improve their appearance, but haven't done anything technical that they could of failed at if they lacked technical ability, haven't even sat and worked on something technical to improve appearance. I won't even say 'its probably cranks'. It's beyond honest crankery now.
edit: or maybe it is actually a good thing. Call yourselves "Centre for AI safety", then it is easily demonstrated you don't work on self driving car safety or anything of this kind, ergo, a bunch of fraudsters.
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This is a poor way to accomplish your goal.
Once, a smart potential supporter stumbled upon the Singularity Institute's (old) website and wanted to know if our mission was something to care about. So he sent our concise summary to an AI researcher and asked if we were serious. The AI researcher saw the word 'Singularity' and, apparently without reading our concise summary, sent back a critique of Ray Kurzweil's "accelerating change" technology curves. (Even though SI researchers tend to be Moore's Law agnostics, and our concise summary says nothing about accelerating change.)
Of course, the 'singularity' we're talking about at SI is intelligence explosion, not accelerating change, and intelligence explosion doesn't depend on accelerating change. The term "singularity" used to mean intelligence explosion (or "the arrival of machine superintelligence" or "an event horizon beyond which we can't predict the future because something smarter than humans is running the show"). But with the success of The Singularity is Near in 2005, most people know "the singularity" as "accelerating change."
How often do we miss out on connecting to smart people because they think we're arguing for Kurzweil's curves? One friend in the U.K. told me he never uses the world "singularity" to talk about AI risk because the people he knows thinks the "accelerating change" singularity is "a bit mental."
LWers are likely to have attachments to the word 'singularity,' and the term does often mean intelligence explosion in the technical literature, but neither of these is a strong reason to keep the word 'singularity' in the name of our AI Risk Reduction organization. If the 'singularity' term is keeping us away from many of the people we care most about reaching, maybe we should change it.
Here are some possible alternatives, without trying too hard:
We almost certainly won't change our name within the next year, but it doesn't hurt to start gathering names now and do some market testing. You were all very helpful in naming "Rationality Group". (BTW, the winning name, "Center for Applied Rationality," came from LWer beoShaffer.)
And, before I am vilified by people who have as much positive affect toward the name "Singularity Institute" as I do, let me note that this was not originally my idea, but I do think it's an idea worth taking seriously enough to bother with some market testing.