poke alleges:

"Being able to create relevant hypotheses is an important skill and one a scientist spends a great deal of his or her time developing. It may not be part of the traditional description of science but that doesn't mean it's not included in the actual social institution of science that produces actual real science here in the real world; it's your description and not science that is faulty."

I know I've been calling my younger self "stupid" but that is a figure of speech; "unskillfully wielding high intelligence" would be more precise. Eliezer₁₈ was not in the habit of making obvious mistakes—it's just that his "obvious" wasn't my "obvious".

No, I did not go through the traditional apprenticeship. But when I look back, and see what Eliezer₁₈ did wrong, I see plenty of modern scientists making the same mistakes. I cannot detect any sign that they were better warned than myself.

Sir Roger Penrose—a world-class physicist—still thinks that consciousness is caused by quantum gravity. I expect that no one ever warned him against mysterious answers to mysterious questions—only told him his hypotheses needed to be falsifiable and have empirical consequences. Just like Eliezer₁₈.

"Consciousness is caused by quantum gravity" has testable implications: It implies that you should be able to look at neurons and discover a coherent quantum superposition (whose collapse?) contributes to information-processing, and that you won't ever be able to reproduce a neuron's input-output behavior using a computable microanatomical simulation...

...but even after you say "Consciousness is caused by quantum gravity", you don't anticipate anything about how your brain thinks "I think therefore I am!" or the mysterious redness of red, that you did not anticipate before, even though you feel like you know a cause of it. This is a tremendous danger sign, I now realize, but it's not the danger sign that I was warned against, and I doubt that Penrose was ever told of it by his thesis advisor. For that matter, I doubt that Niels Bohr was ever warned against it when it came time to formulate the Copenhagen Interpretation.

As far as I can tell, the reason Eliezer₁₈ and Sir Roger Penrose and Niels Bohr were not warned, is that no standard warning exists.

I did not generalize the concept of "mysterious answers t...

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