All of Al Link's Comments + Replies

I'm not Eliezer, but thanks for taking the time to read and engage with the post! The best explanation I can give for the downvotes is that we have a limited amount of space on the front page of the site, and we as a community want to make sure people see content that will be most useful to them. Unfortunately, we simply don't have enough time to engage closely with every new user on the site, addressing every objection and critique. If we tried, it would get difficult for long-time users to hear each other over the stampede of curious newcomers drawn here recently from our AI posts :) By the way, I haven't downvoted your post; I don't think there's any point once you've already gotten this many, and I'd rather give you a more positive impression of the community than add my vote to the pile. I'm sure you presented your ideas with the best of intentions, but it's hard to tell which parts of your argument have merit behind them. In particular, you've brought up many arguments that have been partially addressed in popular LessWrong posts that most users have already read. Your point about certainty is just one example. Believe me, LessWrong LOVES thinking about all the ways we could be wrong (maybe we do it a little too much sometimes). We just have a pretty idiosyncratic way we like to frame things. If someone comes along with ideas for how to improve our rationality, they're much more likely to be received well if they signal that they're familiar with the entire "LessWrong framework of rationality," then explain which parts of it they reject and why. The common refrain for users who don't know this framework is to "read the Sequences." This is just a series of blog posts written by Eliezer in the early days of LessWrong. In the Sequences, Eliezer wrote a lot about consciousness, AI, and other topics you brought up - I think you'd find them quite interesting, even if you disagree with them! You could get started at https://www.readthesequences.com. If you can ma