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jsteinhardt comments on The Inefficiency of Theoretical Discovery - Less Wrong Discussion

19 Post author: lukeprog 03 November 2013 09:26PM

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Comment author: jsteinhardt 05 November 2013 06:00:13AM *  1 point [-]

Out of curiosity, what gives you that impression? I tend to cite it because it is (along with the Lobian cooperation stuff) among the most important results to come out of MIRI's first couple workshops, not because I can already tell whether it's an important breakthrough in mathematical logic in general.

In this very post you placed it in a list next to normative uncertainty and the intelligence explosion. The implication seemed obvious to me but perhaps it was unintended.

I seem to remember other comments / posts where similar sentiments were either expressed or implied, although a quick search doesn't turn them up, so perhaps I was wrong.

Comment author: lukeprog 05 November 2013 06:57:27AM 1 point [-]

The implication seemed obvious to me but perhaps it was unintended.

Yeah, unintended, but I can see why one might infer that.

Does my "philosophical edge" comment imply importance to you? I was merely trying to say that it's philosophical even though I'm thinking of it in terms of AI, and it's not obvious to me, like your first example, why one would read the comment as assigning particular importance to the result.

Comment author: jsteinhardt 05 November 2013 05:02:56PM 0 points [-]

I think that the comment that I quoted is not by itself objectionable to me. If that's actually the only example I can come up with, then I think it would be unfair to criticize it, so I will update the parent to remove it.