Hey, I’m right up to minus 19 - that’s put a smile on my face. Thank you for bringing some balance to the force.
I do sort of understand the antagonism—people in the community want to protect the quality of the content which the community is generating. They value the comradeship of shared values, etiquette, assumptions, agreed-upon starting points for conversations, and so on. Noobs just don’t get it. Noobs are a threat to that. In the first instance, given the reputation, I was surprised that I was allowed to post on here at all without having some established credentials. I mean, I do have a few credentials, but nobody made me provide them.
If I had thought more before just jumping in, I could have been more careful. Perhaps I should have started by commenting rather than posting. Dunno. They could actually enforce that as a way of smoothing the path, maybe. On the other hand, perhaps it’s a fun sport letting noobs stumble around and watching them get burned. Smirk.
I do think it is a very interesting investigation how to design and manage public thinking so that the best possible outcomes are delivered—partly why I wanted to explore playing on here, so as to get some insight into that.
Quite apart from my own adequacies or inadequacies I think there is an interesting debate to be had been LW-style rationality and the thinking that swirls around Heidegger. (Heidegger as like a whirl wind that sucked in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and the whole tradition and sprayed out a whole legacy of subsequent thinkers and tryers.) I wonder if later Wittgenstein could help provide a bridge.
As my first post on LessWrong I was not aware of the particular piece of etiquette w.r.t. not finishing posts with a biographical sentence. I have gotten used to doing this because on Medium.com, where I have been writing articles for about a year now, it is a standard practice to put a biographical note at the end of your articles. I only started doing it cos I saw other people doing it, and I thought it looked smart.
Also because the “Save Draft” button on this post did not work (I kept trying to get it to work—lost the post three times and had to start again), I opted in the end to simply publish the post before I had properly finished editing it.
In any case, in my talk I have summarised some commentaries by notable authorities, in particular the late Prof. Hubert Dreyfus and Prof. William Blatner. I have moved the source links from the end of the document to the beginning, in case anyone doesn’t get that far. Although even in the very first published version of this text, I stated that that was what I was doing right at the top of the text.
If this is “nonsense” then essentially so is the entire lecture course Dreyfus delivered about this subject for fourty years at Berkeley, which I have linked to in the list of sources, which was also included even in the first draft.
Hubert Dreyfus was able to predict the failure of Minsky’s A.I. program at M.I.T. thirty or so years before the people working on it finally gave up on it, and able to tell them why what they were doing was never going to work. And he was able to do that precisely because he understood Heidegger. The M.I.T. A.I. lab spent millions of dollars of defence budget on a futile project precisely because they didn’t.