I blew through all of MoR in about 48 hours, and in an attempt to learn more about the science and philosophy that Harry espouses, I've been reading the sequences and Eliezer's posts on Less Wrong. Eliezer has written extensively about AI, rationality, quantum physics, singularity research, etc. I have a question: how correct has he been? Has his interpretation of quantum physics predicted any subsequently-observed phenomena? Has his understanding of cognitive science and technology allowed him to successfully anticipate the progress of AI research, or has he made any significant advances himself? Is he on the record predicting anything, either right or wrong?
Why is this important: when I read something written by Paul Krugman, I know that he has a Nobel Prize in economics, and I know that he has the best track record of any top pundit in the US in terms of making accurate predictions. Meanwhile, I know that Thomas Friedman is an idiot. Based on this track record, I believe things written by Krugman much more than I believe things written by Friedman. But if I hadn't read Friedman's writing from 2002-2006, then I wouldn't know how terribly wrong he has been, and I would be too credulous about his claims.
Similarly, reading Mike Darwin's predictions about the future of medicine was very enlightening. He was wrong about nearly everything. So now I know to distrust claims that he makes about the pace or extent of subsequent medical research.
Has Eliezer offered anything falsifiable, or put his reputation on the line in any way? "If X and Y don't happen by Z, then I have vastly overestimated the pace of AI research, or I don't understand quantum physics as well as I think I do," etc etc.
This objection is not entirely valid, at least when it comes to Krugman. Krugman scored 17/19 mainly on economic predictions, and one of the two he got wrong looks like a pro-Republican prediction.
From their executive summary:
From the paper:
That's a good point. I didn't read the whole thing, as the basic premise seemed flawed. That does seem like real information about Krugman's accuracy. I'd still wonder about the independence of the predictions, though. Did the paper authors address that issue at all? I saw noise about "statistical significance", so I assumed not.
Are the specific predictions available online? It seemed like they had a large sample of predictions, so I doubt they were in the paper. This gives my estimate of Krugman a slight uptick, but without the actual predictions and results, this data can't do much more for me.