Comment author: Rain 11 May 2012 12:47:23PM 10 points [-]

Harsh but true. Luke seems ready to take all this to heart, and make improvements to address each of these points.

Comment author: tenlier 11 May 2012 07:20:28PM 2 points [-]

That was my half my initial reaction as well,the other half:

The critique mostly consists of points that are pretty persistently bubbling beneath the surface around here, and get brought up quite a bit. Don't most people regard this as a great summary of their current views, rather than persuasive in any way? In fact, the only effect I suspect this had on most people's thinking was to increase their willingness to listen to Karnofsky in the future if he should change his mind. Since the post is basically directed at LessWrongians as an audience, I find all of that a bit suspicious (not in the sense that he's doing this deliberately).

Also, the only part of the post that interested me was this one (about the SI as an organization); the other stuff seemed kinda minor - praising with faint damns, relative to true outsiders, and so perhaps slightly misleading to LessWrongians.

Reading this (at least a year old, I believe) makes me devalue current protestations:

http://www.givewell.org/files/MiscCharities/SIAI/siai%202011%2002%20III.doc

I just assume people are pretty good at manipulating my opinion, and honestly, that often seems more the focus in the "academic outreach". People who think about signalling (outside of economics, evolution, etc) are usually signalling bad stuff. Paying 20K or whatever to have someone write a review of your theory is also really really interesting, as apparently SI is doing (it's on the balance sheet somewhere for that "commissioned" review; forget the exact amount). Working on a dozen papers on which you might only have 5% involvement (again: or whatever) is also really really interesting. I can't evaluate SI, but they smell totally unlike scientists and quite like philosophers. Which is probably true and only problematic inasmuch as EY thinks other philosophy is mostly bunk. The closest thing to actually performed science on LW I've seen was that bit about rates of evolution, which was rather scatterbrained. If anyone can point me to some science, I'd be grateful. The old joke about Comp Sci (neither about Comp nor Sci) need not apply.

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