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.

Artaxerxes comments on Open thread, Oct. 5 - Oct. 11, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: MrMind 05 October 2015 06:50AM

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

Comments (346)

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

Comment author: shminux 08 October 2015 03:35:35PM *  2 points [-]

So, Steven Hawking basically quotes Eliezer Yudkowsky almost verbatim, without giving him any credit, as usual: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama_series_stephen_hawking_ama_answers/

Example:

A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble.

Disappointed.

Comment author: Artaxerxes 08 October 2015 05:41:31PM *  13 points [-]

I think it's great, the ideas getting out is what matters. Whether Eliezer gets some credit or not, the whole reason he said this stuff in the first place was so that people would understand it, repeat it and spread the concept, and that's exactly what's going on. If anything, Eliezer was trying very early to optimize for most convincing and easily understandable phrases, analogies, arguments, etc. so the fact that other people are repeating them or perhaps convergently evolving towards them shows that he did a good job.

And really, if Eliezer's status as a non-formally educated autodidact or whatever else is problematic or working against easing the spread of the information, then I don't see a problem with not crediting him in every single reddit post and news article. The priority is presumably ensuring greater awareness of the problems, and part of that is having prestigious people like Stephen Hawking deliver the info. It's not like there aren't dated posts and pdfs online that show Eliezer saying this stuff more than a decade ago, people can find how early he was on this train.