You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

fezziwig comments on Cynical explanations of FAI critics (including myself) - Less Wrong Discussion

21 Post author: Wei_Dai 13 August 2012 09:19PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (49)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: fezziwig 14 August 2012 07:54:32PM 4 points [-]

I didn't downvote you, but I can see why someone reasonably might. Off the top of my head, in no particular order:

  1. Whole brain emulation isn't the consensus best path to general AI. My intuition agrees with yours here, but you don't show any sign that you understand the subtleties involved well enough to be as certain as you are.
  2. Lots of problematic unsupported assertions, e.g. "intelligent people generally have less children than those on the left half of the Bell curve", "[rich people] are also more likely to have above-average IQs, else they wouldn't be rich", and "[violence and docility are] in the genes and the brain that they produce".
  3. Eugenics!?!
  4. Ok, fine, eugenics, let's talk about it. Your discussion is naive: you assume that IQ is the right metric to optimize for (see Raising the Sanity Waterline for another perspective), you assume that we can measure it accurately enough to produce the effect you want, you assume that it will go on being an effective metric even after we start conditioning reproductive success on it, and your policy prescriptions are socially inept even by LW standards.
  5. Also, it's really slow. That seems ok to you because you don't believe that we'll otherwise have recursive self-improvement in our lifetimes, but that's not the consensus view here either.

I'm not interested in debating any of this, I just wanted to give you an outside perspective on your own writing. I hope it helps, and I hope you decide to stick around.