Before you bother to read any of what follows, I would be grateful if you would answer the following question: Have you, in fact, bozo-bitted me?
I haven't yet, but if you're going to persist in claiming that people with PhDs in philosophy are not even allowed the description 'philosopher', it's tempting because why should I bother with people who abuse language and redefine words so abysmally?
So, allow me to propose a very simple alternative explanation (which is, in fact, the correct explanation, so far as I can tell by introspection): I said it because, having listed a bunch of things that weren't Taube's profession, it seemed appropriate to say what his profession actually was.
Which was pursuant to your belief that a mere librarian could have nothing to say about the issue, could not be any sort of authority or indicator of the times, and so does not belong in the list lukeprog presented. Yes, I've said all this before.
On the basis of this thread so far, I'm guessing that you still don't believe me; so let me ask: Is there, in fact, anything I could possibly say or do that would convince you that I do not hold librarians in contempt?
The obvious reading of your concluding paragraph was obvious, before you started trying to defend it.
Angela Merkel is surely a physicist(1). She is not a physicist(2) now, although she used to be. Whether she's a physicist(3) depends on what threshold we pick and on the extent to which she's kept up her expertise. Similarly, Ian Bostridge is a historian(1), not a historian(2) so far as I know, and might or might not be a historian(3), and similarly for George Soros and philosophy...The relevant notion of "scientist", "philosopher", etc., here was never made explicit. I think I've had meaning 2 in mind sometimes and meaning 3 in mind sometimes.
Indeed. And I think it's absurd to restrict usage of descriptions to the rarefied and elevated #2s (how many biologists get tenure?) and even more absurd to restrict it to the even more rarefied and elevated #3s.
(Merkel & Bostridge were both #2s at some point, but seem likely to never be #3s in those fields; whether we could consider Soros a #3 - because he claims his philosophical approach of reflexivity guides his philanthropy & investing and so his inarguably historic roles there are part and parcel of philosophy - is an interesting question, but getting a bit far afield.)
Taube was an expert in the indexing of documents, and an innovator in that field. In your opinion, does that amount to expertise in computer chess-playing comparable to, say, Fermi's expertise in nuclear fission?
It gives him a great deal of expertise in organizing and searching data mechanically, which is relevant to AI; and inasmuch as chess-playing falls under AI... No, he didn't write his thesis on chess-playing, but here again I would say it's absurd to insist on such doctrinaire rigidity that no one can have respectable expertise without being the expert on a topic. (I would note in passing that Fermi's laurea thesis was not on fission, but X-ray imaging; is that close enough? Well, probably, but then why is indexing and search so out of bounds? Search at Google involves a great deal of AI work, so clearly there is a real connection at some point in time...)
Taube held a PhD in philosophy; I think his thesis was on the history of philosophical thought about causality. Does that amount to, etc., etc.?
I'm afraid I have shocking news for you, many respected philosophers in AI may not have written their theses directly on AI: Dennett's dissertation on consciousness was etc. etc. etc? Or consider John Searle's early work on speech acts, was it etc etc etc? Keeping in mind the recent praise on LW for his work...
I simply don't think that his opinions on computer chess-playing are the same kind of thing as Fermi's opinions on nuclear fission, or Kelvin's on the age of the earth.
All I can do is point to my previous summary and observe that Taube was one of the few contemporaries who grappled with the cybernetics issues, was trained philosophically, built a tech career on primitive computers etc etc. His observations are not chopped liver.
And I think it's absurd to restrict usage of descriptions to the rarefied and elevated #2s (how many biologists get tenure?)
Doing X for a living is a lower bar than being tenured.
In an erratum to my previous post on Pascalian wagers, it has been plausibly argued to me that all the roads to nuclear weapons, including plutonium production from U-238, may have bottlenecked through the presence of significant amounts of Earthly U235 (apparently even the giant heap of unrefined uranium bricks in Chicago Pile 1 was, functionally, empty space with a scattering of U235 dust). If this is the case then Fermi's estimate of a "ten percent" probability of nuclear weapons may have actually been justifiable because nuclear weapons were almost impossible (at least without particle accelerators) - though it's not totally clear to me why "10%" instead of "2%" or "50%" but then I'm not Fermi.
We're all familiar with examples of correct scientific skepticism, such as about Uri Geller and hydrino theory. We also know many famous examples of scientists just completely making up their pessimism, for example about the impossibility of human heavier-than-air flight. Before this occasion I could only think offhand of one other famous example of erroneous scientific pessimism that was not in defiance of the default extrapolation of existing models, namely Lord Kelvin's careful estimate from multiple sources that the Sun was around sixty million years of age. This was wrong, but because of new physics - though you could make a case that new physics might well be expected in this case - and there was some degree of contrary evidence from geology, as I understand it - and that's not exactly the same as technological skepticism - but still. Where there are sort of two, there may be more. Can anyone name a third example of erroneous scientific pessimism whose error was, to the same degree, not something a smarter scientist could've seen coming?
I ask this with some degree of trepidation, since by most standards of reasoning essentially anything is "justifiable" if you try hard enough to find excuses and then not question them further, so I'll phrase it more carefully this way: I am looking for a case of erroneous scientific pessimism, preferably about technological impossibility or extreme difficulty, where it seems clear that the inverse case for possibility would've been weaker if carried out strictly with contemporary knowledge, after exploring points and counterpoints. (So that relaxed standards for "justifiability" will just produce even more justifiable cases for the technological possibility.) We probably should also not accept as "erroneous" any prediction of technological impossibility where it required more than, say, seventy years to get the technology.