Don't bogart that joint, my friend.

It is true that the topic is too large for casual followers (such as myself). So rather than aiming at refining any of the points personally, I wonder in what ways Robin has convinced Eli, and vice-versa. Because certainly, if this were a productive debate, they would be able to describe how they are coming to consensus. And from my perspective there are distinct signals that the anticipation of a successful debate declines as posts become acknowledged for their quality as satire.

"In a foom that took two years.."

The people of the future will be in a considerably better position than you to evaluate their immediate future. More importantly, they are in a position to modify their future based on that knowledge. This anticipatory reaction is what makes both of your opinions exceedingly tenuous. Everyone else who embarks on pinning down the future at least has the sense to sell books.

In the light of this, the goal should be to use each other's complementary talents to find the hardest rock solid platform not to sell the other a castle made of sand.

And I believe that if two very smart people manage to agree on where to go for lunch they have accomplished a lot for one day.

Perhaps you are marginally ahead of your time Eliezer, and the young individuals that will flush out the theory are still traipsing about in diapers. In which case, either being a billionare or a phD makes it more likely you can become their mentor. I'd do the former if you have a choice.

What could an AI do, yet still be unable to self-optimize? Quite a bit it turns out: everything that a modern human can do as a minimum and possibly a great deal more since *we* have yet to demonstrate that we can engineer intelligence. (I admit here that it may be college-level material once discovered)

If we define the singularity as the wall beyond which is unpredictable, I think we can have an effective singularity without FOOM. This follows from admitting that we can have computers that are superior to us in every way, without even achieving recursive modification. These machines then have all the attendant advantages of limitless hardware, replicability, perfect and expansive memory, deep serial computation, rationality by design, limitless external sensors, etc.

*if* it is useless to predict past the singularity, and *if* foom is unlikely to occur prior to the singularity, does this make the pursuit of friendliness irrelevant? Do we have to postulate foom = singularity in order to justify friendliness?

While awaiting my productivity to reemerge from chaos I stumbled upon an old interview with Ayn Rand and Tom Snyder in which she concludes with 'Thank God for America'. So there ya go.

meh. My last point doesn't make sense. Fixing the bias isn't equivalent to fixing your problem.

So it can be a mind projection fallacy even when you are ultimately reasoning about your own mind? Something needs to cancel out in the divisor. A more accurate assessment of others' mental nature may not assist you when you then tie it back into your own. You have mentioned this productivity issue a couple times, and yet don't want solutions suggested. Now that could be because the solution itself is OT (identifying is ok, but fixing a bias is OT), or because you don't think what works for others could actually work for you.

The Socrates paragraph stands out to me. It doesn't seem sporting to downplay one approach in comparison to another by creating two scenarios, with one being what a five-year old might say and the other being what a college grad (or someone smart enough to go to college) might say. Can that point be illustrated without giving such an unbalanced appearance?

The problem of course (to the discussion and to the above example)is: how much do you think you know about the underlying mechanics of what you are analyzing?