3 ms·

What I’ve found when studying ontological arguments is, if you replace god with pink unicorns and the argument still holds, the argument is lacking something.

What I’ve found when studying ontological arguments is, if you replace god with pink unicorns and the argument still holds, the argument is lacking something. I mentally replaced AGI with zombies in this article and quite a lot of it held up. I don’t think it’s completely wrong, but it cherrypicks mercilessly. For example, the section on innovations turning up quicker than predicted has some fairly sizeable counters eg fusion. TBH what I did get from it is that there will probably be a fire alarm breakthrough at some point and that’s what we should be looking for. Sort of the opposite of the author’ s position.

gjm11 9y ago
Yudkowsky isn't claiming "innovations always turn up quicker than expected", to which indeed fusion would be a counterexample, he's claiming "very soon before an innovation turns up, it often seems decades in the future even to most practitioners", and fusion is not a counterexample to that.
- lucozade 9y ago
  Right but on the quadrants of predictions of timing vs imminence, all the examples are in one quadrant to justify the need to act now. Fair enough for reinforcing a narrative but a tad disingenuous.
  - Filligree 9y ago
    All possible examples would seem to be in one quadrant, because what we remember -- if anything -- is the time just before it in fact was made possible. The alternative would be technologies that were never developed at all, most of which never had this sort of discussion and therefore wouldn't work as examples. Take a more historical view, though, and you'll notice there were people claiming flight was near even decades before the Wright brothers.
    - ciphergoth 9y ago
      Right, exactly as Eliezer says. There are plenty of examples in all four quadrants, so as a way of working out how near a technology is, this works less well than you'd like.

3 ms·

What I’ve found when studying ontological arguments is, if you replace god with pink unicorns and the argument still holds, the argument is lacking something.

by lucozade 9y ago

gjm11 9y ago
Yudkowsky isn't claiming "innovations always turn up quicker than expected", to which indeed fusion would be a counterexample, he's claiming "very soon before an innovation turns up, it often seems decades in the future even to most practitioners", and fusion is not a counterexample to that.
- lucozade 9y ago
  Right but on the quadrants of predictions of timing vs imminence, all the examples are in one quadrant to justify the need to act now. Fair enough for reinforcing a narrative but a tad disingenuous.
  - Filligree 9y ago
    All possible examples would seem to be in one quadrant, because what we remember -- if anything -- is the time just before it in fact was made possible. The alternative would be technologies that were never developed at all, most of which never had this sort of discussion and therefore wouldn't work as examples. Take a more historical view, though, and you'll notice there were people claiming flight was near even decades before the Wright brothers.
    - ciphergoth 9y ago
      Right, exactly as Eliezer says. There are plenty of examples in all four quadrants, so as a way of working out how near a technology is, this works less well than you'd like.