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Tetronian comments on The Singularity Institute's Arrogance Problem - Less Wrong Discussion

63 Post author: lukeprog 18 January 2012 10:30PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 19 January 2012 02:47:19AM 39 points [-]

I don't think you're taking enough of an outside view. Here's how these accomplishments look to "regular" people:

CFAI, while confusingly written, was way ahead of its time, and what Eliezer figured out in the early 2000s is slowly becoming a mainstream position accepted by, e.g., Google's AGI team.

You wrote something 11 years ago, which you now consider defunct and still is not a mainstream view in any field.

The Sequences are simply awesome.

You wrote series of esoteric blog posts that some people like.

And he did manage to write the most popular Harry Potter fanfic of all time.

You re-wrote the story of Harry Potter. How is this relevant to saving the world, again?

Finally, I suspect many people's doubts about SIAI's horsepower could be best addressed by arranging a single 2-hour conversation between them and Carl Shulman. But you'd have to visit the Bay Area, and we can't afford to have him do nothing but conversations, anyway. If you want a taste, you can read his comment history, which consists of him writing the exactly correct thing to say in almost every comment he's made for the past several years.

You have a guy who is pretty smart. Ok...

The point I'm trying to make is, muflax's diagnosis of "lame" isn't far off the mark. There's nothing here with the ability to wow someone who hasn't heard of SIAI before, or to encourage people to not be put off by arguments like the one Eliezer makes in the Q&A.

Comment author: atucker 19 January 2012 10:53:59AM *  11 points [-]

You re-wrote the story of Harry Potter. How is this relevant to saving the world, again?

It's actually been incredibly useful to establishing the credibility of every x-risk argument that I've had with people my age.

"Have you read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality?"

"YES!"

"Ah, awesome!"

merriment ensues

topic changes to something about things that people are doing

"So anyway the guy who wrote that also does...."

Comment author: [deleted] 19 January 2012 12:23:54PM 19 points [-]

Again, take the outside outside view. The kind of conversation you described only happens with people who have read HPMoR--just telling people about the fic isn't really impressive. (Especially if we are talking about the 90+% of the population who know nothing about fanfiction.) Ditto for the Sequences, they're only impressive after the fact. Compare this to publishing a number of papers in a mainstream journal, which is a huge status boost even to people who have never actually read the papers.

Comment author: atucker 19 January 2012 12:38:24PM 1 point [-]

I don't think that that kind of status converts nearly as well as establishing a niche of people who start adopting your values, and then talking to them.

Comment author: [deleted] 19 January 2012 01:46:01PM *  14 points [-]

Perhaps not, but Luke was using HPMoR as an example of an accomplishment that would help negate accusations of arrogance, and for the majority of "regular" people, hearing that SIAI published journal articles does that better than hearing that they published Harry Potter fanfiction.

Comment author: pjeby 23 January 2012 06:37:32AM 4 points [-]

for the majority of "regular" people, hearing that SIAI published journal articles does that better than hearing that they published Harry Potter fanfiction

The majority of "regular" people don't know what journals are; apart from the Wall Street Journal and the New England Journal of Medicine, they mostly haven't heard of any. If asked about journal articles, many would say, "you mean like a blog?" (if younger) or think you were talking about a diary or a newspaper (if older).

They have, however, heard of Harry Potter. ;-)

Comment author: private_messaging 27 July 2012 04:02:23PM 0 points [-]

You know what would be awesome, it's if Eliezer wrote original Harry Potter to obtain funding for the SI.

Seriously, there is a plenty of people whom I would not pay to work on AI, who accomplished far more than anyone at SI, in the more relevant fields.

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