Luke has just told me (personal conversation) that what he got from my comment was, "SIAI's difficulties were just due to lack of funding" which was not what I was trying to say at all. What I was trying to convey was more like, "I didn't have the ability to run this organization, and knew this - people who I hoped would be able to run the organization, while I tried to produce in other areas (e.g. turning my back on everything else to get a year of FAI work done with Marcello or writing the Sequences) didn't succeed in doing so either - and the only reason we could hang on long enough to hire Luke was that the funding was available nonetheless and in sufficient quantity that we could afford to take risks like paying Luke to stay on for a while, well before we knew he would become Executive Director".

Thank you for saying this, Grognor! As you say, being willing to come out and say such is an important antidote to that phyg-ish nervous expression.

Sounds like group selection theory to me. If you have a group of slaves and one slave has a gene that makes them unproductive, I doubt they'll have better reproductive fitness than the others - you'd just dispose of the bad slave. It only works for all the slaves, if all the slaves have the same gene - so it only works if group selection works, and group selection doesn't work.

IIRC Roko deleted the speculation-about-superintelligences part of the post shortly after its publication, but discussion in the comments raged on, so you subsequently banned the whole post/discussion.

This sounds right to me, but I still have little trust in my memories.

Your comment also made me recall another comment you [Kip] wrote a couple of years ago about how my status in this community made a criticism of you feel like a "huge insult", which I couldn't understand at the time and just ignored.

My brain really, really does not want to update on the numerous items of evidence available to it that it can hit people much much harder now, owing to community status, than when it was 12 years old.

Now I've got no idea what I did. Maybe my own memory was mixed up by hearing other people say that the post was deleted by Roko? Or Roko retracted it after I banned it, or it was banned and then unbanned and then Roko retracted it?

I retract my grandparent comment; I have little trust for my own memories. Thanks for catching this.

I like this chart.

I agree that top mainstream AI guy Peter Norvig was way the heck more sensible than the reference class of declared "AGI researchers" when I talked to him about FAI and CEV, and that estimates should be substantially adjusted accordingly.

Ben Goertzel's projects are knowably hopeless, so I didn't too strongly oppose Tyler Emerson's project from within SIAI's then-Board of Directors; it was being argued to have political benefits, and I saw no noticeable x-risk so I didn't expend my own political capital to veto it, just sighed. Nowadays the Board would not vote for this.

And it is also true that, in the hypothetical counterfactual conditional where Goertzel's creations work, we all die. I'd phrase the email message differently today to avoid any appearance of endorsing the probability, because today I understand better that most people have trouble mentally separating hypotheticals. But the hypothetical is still true in that counterfactual universe, if not in this one.

There is no contradiction here.