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Punoxysm comments on Open thread, 9-15 June 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think your initial post was not the best / least-condescending way of talking about the singularity. But I think the main problem you encountered was that many of the commenters were religious and openly anti-materialist. If you think God created man in his image and that man's consciousness and cognition are special and linked to a divine, immaterial element called a soul, it's going to be hard to convince you of superhuman AI. Trying to start off with an argument for materialism conflated with an argument for extrapolating current scientific trends is just going to make them dig in further.
So you really were in a lose-lose situation. But your response was solid; certainly better than the original case.
A better point many of those commenters make is the distinction between extrapolation and creation; even if I disagree that singularity predictions are optimistic navel-gazing, it's still fair to say that the path to the singularity is not laid out in a concise and reasonable way (and pointing to Kurzweil's charts is a poor response).
I thought it largely ignored the points and positions Wright made, and the counter-arguments weren't great. (I like Bostrom, but when someone makes a laughable claim like materialism is associated with no great philosophers, that's not a good time to bring him up; that's a time to invoke Hume, the Atomists and Stoics, Dennett, etc.)
If one is going to respond at all (and given how intemperate his response was, I would personally feel no obligation to reply), one should try to do at least a decent job which doesn't demonstrate one's opponent's claim that materialists don't know "enough philosophy to argue with a freshman" and possibly fostering a back-fire effect. (Hopefully wittily, like quoting some of Wright's bile and then sardonicly noting that Wright's religious conversion after a heart attack is itself an excellent example of materialism.) Strawmen are common enough without becoming a living one.
Chapeau!