SI is arrogant because it pretends to be even better than science, while failing to publish in significant scientific papers. If this does not seem like a pseudoscience or cult, I don’t know what does.
So please either stop pretending to be so great or prove it! For starters, it is not necessary to publish a paper about AI; you can choose any other topic.
No offense; I honestly think you are all awesome. But there are some traditional ways to prove one’s skills, and if you don’t accept the challenge, you look like wimps. Even if the ritual is largely a waste of time (all signals are costly), there are thousands of people who have passed it, so a group of x-rational gurus should be able to use their magical powers and do it in five minutes, right?
Yeah. The best way to dispel the aura of arrogance is to actually accomplish something amazing. So, SIAI should publish some awesome papers, or create a powerful (1) AI capable of some impressive task like playing Go (2), or end poverty in Haiti (3), or something. Until they do, and as long as they’re claiming to be super-awesome despite the lack of any non-meta achievements, they’ll be perceived as arrogant.
(1) But not too powerful, I suppose. (2) Seeing as Jeopardy is taken. (3) In a non-destructive way.
There are indeed times you can get the right answer in five minutes (no, seconds), but it still takes the same length of time as for everyone else to write the thing up into a paper.
How much is that “same length of time”? Hours? Days? If 5 days of work could make LW acceptable in scientific circles, is it not worth doing? It is better to complain why oh why more people don’t treat SI seriously?
Can some part of that work be oursourced? Just write the outline of the answer, then find some smart guy in India and pay him like $100 to write it? Or if money is not enough for people who could write the paper well, could you bribe someone by offering them co-authorship? Graduate students have to publish in papers anyway, so if you give them a complete solution, they should be happy to cooperate.
Or set up a “scientific wiki” on SI site, where the smartest people will write the outlines of their articles, and the lesser brains can contribute by completing the texts.
These are my solutions, which seem rather obvious to me. It is not sure they would work, but I guess trying them is better than do nothing. Could a group of x-rational gurus find seven more solutions in five minutes?
From outside, this seems like: “Yeah, I totally could do it, but I will not. Now explain me why are people, who can do it, percieved like more skilled than me?”—“Because they showed everyone they can do it, duh.”
Upvoted for clearly pointing out the tradeoff (yes publicly visible accomplishments that are easy to recognize as accomplishments may not be the most useful thing to work on, but not looking awesome is a price paid for that and needs to be taken into account in deciding what’s useful). However, I want to point out that if I heard that an important paper was written by someone who was paid $100 and doesn’t appear on the author list, my crackpot/fraud meter (as related to the people on the author list) would go ping-Ping-PING, whether that’s fair or not. This makes me worry that there’s still a real danger of SIAI sending the wrong signals to people in academia (for similar but different reasons than in the OP).
SI is arrogant because it pretends to be even better than science, while failing to publish in significant scientific papers. If this does not seem like a pseudoscience or cult, I don’t know what does.
So please either stop pretending to be so great or prove it! For starters, it is not necessary to publish a paper about AI; you can choose any other topic.
No offense; I honestly think you are all awesome. But there are some traditional ways to prove one’s skills, and if you don’t accept the challenge, you look like wimps. Even if the ritual is largely a waste of time (all signals are costly), there are thousands of people who have passed it, so a group of x-rational gurus should be able to use their magical powers and do it in five minutes, right?
Yeah. The best way to dispel the aura of arrogance is to actually accomplish something amazing. So, SIAI should publish some awesome papers, or create a powerful (1) AI capable of some impressive task like playing Go (2), or end poverty in Haiti (3), or something. Until they do, and as long as they’re claiming to be super-awesome despite the lack of any non-meta achievements, they’ll be perceived as arrogant.
(1) But not too powerful, I suppose.
(2) Seeing as Jeopardy is taken.
(3) In a non-destructive way.
2016 update: Go is now also taken.
Impressive tasks remaining as (t-> inf) approaches zero!
If not to AI or heat death, we’re doomed to having already done everything amazing.
There are indeed times you can get the right answer in five minutes (no, seconds), but it still takes the same length of time as for everyone else to write the thing up into a paper.
How much is that “same length of time”? Hours? Days? If 5 days of work could make LW acceptable in scientific circles, is it not worth doing? It is better to complain why oh why more people don’t treat SI seriously?
Can some part of that work be oursourced? Just write the outline of the answer, then find some smart guy in India and pay him like $100 to write it? Or if money is not enough for people who could write the paper well, could you bribe someone by offering them co-authorship? Graduate students have to publish in papers anyway, so if you give them a complete solution, they should be happy to cooperate.
Or set up a “scientific wiki” on SI site, where the smartest people will write the outlines of their articles, and the lesser brains can contribute by completing the texts.
These are my solutions, which seem rather obvious to me. It is not sure they would work, but I guess trying them is better than do nothing. Could a group of x-rational gurus find seven more solutions in five minutes?
From outside, this seems like: “Yeah, I totally could do it, but I will not. Now explain me why are people, who can do it, percieved like more skilled than me?”—“Because they showed everyone they can do it, duh.”
Upvoted for clearly pointing out the tradeoff (yes publicly visible accomplishments that are easy to recognize as accomplishments may not be the most useful thing to work on, but not looking awesome is a price paid for that and needs to be taken into account in deciding what’s useful). However, I want to point out that if I heard that an important paper was written by someone who was paid $100 and doesn’t appear on the author list, my crackpot/fraud meter (as related to the people on the author list) would go ping-Ping-PING, whether that’s fair or not. This makes me worry that there’s still a real danger of SIAI sending the wrong signals to people in academia (for similar but different reasons than in the OP).