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katydee 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: FiftyTwo 19 January 2012 12:32:05AM 22 points [-]

Thought experiment

If the SIAI was a group of self interested/self deceiving individuals, similar to new age groups, who had made up all this stuff about rationality and FAI as a cover for fundraising what different observations would we expect?

Comment author: katydee 19 January 2012 05:34:39PM *  17 points [-]

I would expect them to:

  • 1- Never hire anybody or hire only very rarely
  • 2- Not release information about their finances
  • 3- Avoid high-profile individuals or events
  • 4- Laud their accomplishments a lot without producing concrete results
  • 5- Charge large amounts of money for classes/training
  • 6- Censor dissent on official areas, refuse to even think about the possibility of being a cult, etc.
  • 7- Not produce useful results

SIAI does not appear to fit 1 (I'm not sure what the standard is here), certainly does not fit 2 or 3, debatably fits 4, and certainly does not fit 5 or 6. 7 is highly debatable but I would argue that the Sequences and other rationality material are clearly valuable, if somewhat obtuse.

Comment author: private_messaging 27 July 2012 03:50:03PM *  3 points [-]

That goes for self interested individuals with high rationality, purely material goals, and very low self deception. The self deceived case, on the other hand, is the people whose self interest includes 'feeling important' and 'believing oneself to be awesome' and perhaps even 'taking a shot at becoming the saviour of mankind'. In that case you should expect them to see awesomeness in anything that might possibly be awesome (various philosophy, various confused texts that might be becoming mainstream for all we know, you get the idea), combined with absence of anything that is definitely awesome and can't be trivial (a new algorithmic solution to long standing well known problem that others worked on, practically important enough, etc).

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