There is a huge diversity in posts on AI alignment on this forum. I’d agree that some of them are pseudo-scientific, but many more posts fall in one of the following categories:
authors follow the scientific method of some discipline, or use multidisciplinary methods,
authors admit outright that they are in a somewhat pre-scientific state, i.e. they do not have a method/paradigm yet that they have any confidence in, or
authors are talking about their gut feelings of what might be true, and again freely admit this
Arguably, posts of type 2 and 3 above are not scientific, but as they do not pretend to be, we can hardly call them pseudo-scientific.
That being said, this forum is arguably a community, but its participants do not cohere into anything as self-consistent as a single scientific or even pseudo-scientific field.
In a scientific or pseudo-scientific field, the participants would at least agree somewhat on what the basic questions and methods are, and would agree somewhat on which main questions are open and which have been closed. On this forum, there is no such agreement. Notably, there are plenty of people here who make a big deal out of distrusting not just their own paradigms, but also those used by everybody else, including of course those used by ‘mainstream’ AI research.
If there is any internally coherent field this forum resembles, it is the field of philosophy, where you can score points by claiming to have a superior lack of knowledge, compared to all these other deep thinkers.
There is a huge diversity in posts on AI alignment on this forum. I’d agree that some of them are pseudo-scientific, but many more posts fall in one of the following categories:
authors follow the scientific method of some discipline, or use multidisciplinary methods,
authors admit outright that they are in a somewhat pre-scientific state, i.e. they do not have a method/paradigm yet that they have any confidence in, or
authors are talking about their gut feelings of what might be true, and again freely admit this
Arguably, posts of type 2 and 3 above are not scientific, but as they do not pretend to be, we can hardly call them pseudo-scientific.
That being said, this forum is arguably a community, but its participants do not cohere into anything as self-consistent as a single scientific or even pseudo-scientific field.
In a scientific or pseudo-scientific field, the participants would at least agree somewhat on what the basic questions and methods are, and would agree somewhat on which main questions are open and which have been closed. On this forum, there is no such agreement. Notably, there are plenty of people here who make a big deal out of distrusting not just their own paradigms, but also those used by everybody else, including of course those used by ‘mainstream’ AI research.
If there is any internally coherent field this forum resembles, it is the field of philosophy, where you can score points by claiming to have a superior lack of knowledge, compared to all these other deep thinkers.