Just read over that for the first time and it seems to me that Eliezer’s argument relies heavily on the anthropic principle, that is, it underestimates the amount of resources it has taken the universe to produce a very small amount of life, so far as we know.
Despite the anthropic principle, we should still expect to have been produced in a relatively likely way for intelligence to have been produced; it would still be surprising for us to observe ourselves to have evolved from chimps so quickly, conditioned on it being extremely hard to go from chimp to human.
...well, in general. In this particular case, it could also be, say, that conditions selecting for intelligence are very unlikely to persist for more than a few million years, but I can’t think of any independent reason to think that likely.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure most of Eliezer’s statements about evolution are just slogans to illustrate arguments with deeper support.
The argumentation is not particularly rigorous and resorts to lots of name calling. Voted down because this guy does not appear to be worth engaging.
Robin’s debate with Eliezer over the future of AI is much more thoughtful.
Richard appears to not know what he is talking about, yes. That doesn’t stop him, though!
Just read over that for the first time and it seems to me that Eliezer’s argument relies heavily on the anthropic principle, that is, it underestimates the amount of resources it has taken the universe to produce a very small amount of life, so far as we know.
Despite the anthropic principle, we should still expect to have been produced in a relatively likely way for intelligence to have been produced; it would still be surprising for us to observe ourselves to have evolved from chimps so quickly, conditioned on it being extremely hard to go from chimp to human.
...well, in general. In this particular case, it could also be, say, that conditions selecting for intelligence are very unlikely to persist for more than a few million years, but I can’t think of any independent reason to think that likely.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure most of Eliezer’s statements about evolution are just slogans to illustrate arguments with deeper support.
This is not something I know a lot about, perhaps that is why I don’t understand either part of your comment.