“How much should we be troubled, though, by the fact that most scientists of their disciplines shun them?”
This is not what’s actually going on. To quote Eliezer:
“With regard to academia ‘showing little interest’ in my work—you have a rather idealized view of academia if you think that they descend on every new idea in existence to approve or disapprove it. It takes a tremendous amount of work to get academia to notice something at all—you have to publish article after article, write commentaries on other people’s work from within your reference frame so they notice you, go to conferences and promote your idea, et cetera. Saying that academia has ‘shown little interest’ implies that I put in that work, and they weren’t interested. This is not so. I haven’t yet taken my case to academia. And they have not said anything about it, or even noticed I exist, one way or the other. A few academics such as Nick Bostrom and Ben Goertzel have quoted me in their papers and invited me to contribute book chapters—that’s about it.”
“How much should we be troubled, though, by the fact that most scientists of their disciplines shun them?”
This is not what’s actually going on. To quote Eliezer:
“With regard to academia ‘showing little interest’ in my work—you have a rather idealized view of academia if you think that they descend on every new idea in existence to approve or disapprove it. It takes a tremendous amount of work to get academia to notice something at all—you have to publish article after article, write commentaries on other people’s work from within your reference frame so they notice you, go to conferences and promote your idea, et cetera. Saying that academia has ‘shown little interest’ implies that I put in that work, and they weren’t interested. This is not so. I haven’t yet taken my case to academia. And they have not said anything about it, or even noticed I exist, one way or the other. A few academics such as Nick Bostrom and Ben Goertzel have quoted me in their papers and invited me to contribute book chapters—that’s about it.”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Eliezer_Yudkowsky)