8 ms·

Just for those of you who aren't aware, LessWrong is a site devoted to the cult of the "singularity." The site founder, Eliezer Yudkowsky, is a secular humanis

Just for those of you who aren't aware, LessWrong is a site devoted to the cult of the "singularity." The site founder, Eliezer Yudkowsky, is a secular humanist who is probably most well-known for his Harry Potter fanfiction, "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality." His core beliefs include that the obvious goal of the human race is immortality, that it is justifiable to kill a man if it would remove a spec of dust from the eye of every other person on Earth, and that the most important thing we could possibly be doing right now is devoting all of our time developing a mathematical model of a "safe AI." The site frequently dallies with discredited ideas like Drexlerian nanobots and some on the site take absurd concepts like "Roko's Basilisk" [1] seriously. All of this is not to discredit this specific article. And there are lots of very intelligent posters there. But I tend to take everything I read there with a massive grain of salt. [1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

lucisferre 12y ago
It's funny but this article is actually the strongest evidence of cult behaviour. Teaching you how to be "happy" is pretty much the initial selling point of almost every cult out there. Just walk by any Scientology building. Also from the wiki you linked [1] > Some people familiar with the LessWrong memeplex have suffered serious psychological distress after contemplating basilisk-like ideas — even when they're fairly sure intellectually that it's a silly problem.[5] The notion is taken sufficiently seriously by some LessWrong posters that they try to work out how to erase evidence of themselves so a future AI can't reconstruct a copy of them to torture Wow either that article is hyperbolizing this or... wow. [1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk#The_LessWrong_reaction http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk#The_LessWrong... [5] (reference from the quote) http://lesswrong.com/lw/fq3/open_thread_december_115_2012/80v8#20121230 http://lesswrong.com/lw/fq3/open_thread_december_115_2012/80...
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  > It's funny but this article is actually the strongest evidence of cult behaviour. Teaching you how to be "happy" is pretty much the initial selling point of almost every cult out there. This is nonsense. It's an article posted to a curated community blog by some guy who happens to like reading tons of psychology papers and wanted to do some research into the state of scientific understanding of happiness. Is Wikipedia selling a cult too now[0]? [0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness
  - maaku 12y ago
    > This is nonsense. It's an article posted to a curated community blog by some guy who happens to like reading tons of psychology papers and wanted to do some research into the state of scientific understanding of happiness... ...and is executive director of MIRI, the organization hosting and providing most of the content to Less Wrong.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      Which would be an equivalent of pg posting his essay to HN, and then people accusing HNers of cultishness because of that essay. Hmm... actually, that happens every now and then and is exactly as fair as the accusations against lukeprog and LessWrong. Also, MIRI was created years after LessWrong.
      - maaku 12y ago
        MIRI is the continuation of SIAI which predates (and started) LessWrong.
        dllthomas 12y ago
        Though Luke's involvement does not, not that that really means much.
- davidgerard 12y ago
  Luke didn't walk by Scientology, he walked in: http://lesswrong.com/lw/58m/build_small_skills_in_the_right_order/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/58m/build_small_skills_in_the_right_... You'll see me in the comments going "WHAT THE HELL, HERO."
deleted 12y ago
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- rsaarelm 12y ago
  I'm a member of their IRC channel and have no idea what the channel invasions thing is about. What have I been missing out on?
jeremyjh 12y ago
You forgot to take a jab at cryonics. Eliezer sincerely believes that people who do not sign-up their kids with a cryonics package are "lousy parents". http://lesswrong.com/lw/1mc/normal_cryonics/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/1mc/normal_cryonics/
- eudox 12y ago
  And there are people who sincerely believe cryonics is some sort of weird pipe dream. Can you believe it?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
spindritf 12y ago
You should take Slate[1] with an even bigger grain of salt. While Less Wrong is a canonical illustration of all the problems with high IQ people, at least they try to be accurate in their beliefs. Which is the actual purpose of the site. Singularity, consequentialism/utilitarianism, and so on are side effects. [1] I'm guessing http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/07/roko_s_basilisk_the_most_terrifying_thought_experiment_of_all_time.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/07/rok... right?
- Jweb_Guru 12y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean. I've been following LessWrong for a while now, but I've never seen that Slate article before. I should be clear that most posters do not agree with the idea itself, as it is fairly absurd. What's more interesting are the thought processes that might lead one to consider such an idea, which are in full evidence throughout the site.
Traubert 12y ago
> that it is justifiable to kill a man if it would remove a spec of dust from the eye of every other person on Earth Maybe Eliezer has argued that too, but I doubt it. He has said it about a much, much, much larger number of people than everyone on Earth.
- Jweb_Guru 12y ago
  Sure, it's probable that I'm misremembering the exact numbers. Though I realize that the numbers are critical to the proposition from his perspective, I think the fact that he would consider it at all probably differentiates his worldview from that of a lot of people.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    "Sure, it's probable that I'm misremembering the exact numbers." The exact number makes "the population of Earth" a tiny rounding error away from zero. Eliezer could be entirely right in his conclusion here ("core belief" is a gross mischaracterization - it follows from other things, not the other way around) and it could still be wrong to torture a man for a minute to spare dust specks in eyes of a billion Earths (and thats not even getting us much closer to the number in question). That he would consider it at all differentiates his thinking only from those who don't think about these things. "What happens in the extreme?" is a useful question, when trying to pin down how systems work.
adamzerner 12y ago
Maybe you disagree with some of the conclusions, but do you disagree with the methods it preaches? Ie. reductionism, awareness of our biases, bayesian inference. There do seem to be a lot of extreme viewpoints on LessWrong, so I think it is justified to take those extreme viewpoints with a grain of salt. But I also think that the core beliefs/approaches are valid, and so that should be factored in to how big a grain of salt you take things with.
- Jweb_Guru 12y ago
  I think they're probably a little too focused on the Bayesian interpretation, but yes, the site has plenty of good content. In particular, it is a really excellent way of finding effective charities. Where the site goes astray is that it has its own preconceived biases--e.g. its priors for the eventual development of a transhuman AI.
skrebbel 12y ago
I agree with the grain of salt, but you're being overly dismissive. Calling them a cult surely is over the top. It's just a bunch of grumpy nerds with a somewhat hardline "rational" fanaticism, who love to spend late dark nights on the internet reasoning about stuff.
abraxasz 12y ago
I agree with your remarks. One reason, however, why I still enjoy reading articles on the site from time to time is that they almost always make me think. Their perspectives, however flawed, have the merit of being strongly coherent, and trying to find what's wrong with an article turns out to be a very good exercise in judgment.
mhb 12y ago
Where have Drexler's nanobots been credibly discredited?
- davidgerard 12y ago
  Every real-world chemist who looks into the idea.
  - mhb 12y ago
    And yet, surprisingly, you don't have a reference.
JamesArgo 12y ago
I do not understand why there are so many haters of LessWrong. It's not a cult. No one on that site has ever bought into the Roko idea. Also, Roko's post is poorly explained there. However, everyone thought it was nonsense at the time and still does. Imagine if the most inane nonsense posted to hacker news was used to dismiss everyone who posts here. As for nanotechnology. It is possible - biology is a proof of that - though some of the early visions may have been naive. It's likely that artificial systems can be created using a broader pallet than natural selection does, and that these technologies will be powerful. >That it is justifiable to kill a man if it would remove a spec of dust from the eye of every other person on Earth No, he wrote that it was justifiable to torture a man to prevent 3^^^3 dust specs from floating into 3^^^3 eyes. 3^^^3 is a mind-bogglingly large number - far far far far far more than everyone on earth.
- vertex-four 12y ago
  > I do not understand why there are so many haters of LessWrong. A lot of us have ended up in places where they have tried to force their beliefs on us (a huge one being "debate is always the correct way to understand things, and is never inappropriate in any situation ever" - the concept of, say, cooperative discussion, or even caring about people's emotions and sense of self, seems to have never occurred to any of them that I have met). It's rather understandable that many would see them as a cult, given the religious fervour that many of them have in forcing their beliefs on others.
  - JamesArgo 12y ago
    >Or even caring about people's emotions and sense of self, seems to have never occurred to any of them that I have met. But that's not relevant to a community focusing on rational discussion. And it's the exact opposite of what cults do - they try to shower their followers with love. Not caring too much about people's emotional attachments to their beliefs is appropriate on LessWrong. It is inappropriate outside of that context.
    - vertex-four 12y ago
maaku 12y ago
Play fair. > His core beliefs include that the obvious goal of the human race is immortality "We should be allowed to live as long as we want to." Emphasis on the want. I don't find that very controversial. > that it is justifiable to kill a man if it would remove a spec of dust from the eye of every other person on Earth No, the setup was one person's torture for 50 years (not death), or specks of dust in the eyes of 3^^^3 people. How much is 3^^^3 people? * 3^3 = 27. * 3^^3 = (3^(3^3)) = 3^27 = 7625597484987. * 3^^^3 = (3^^(3^^3)) = 3^^7625597484987 = (3^(3^(3^(... 7625597484987 times ...)))). "3^^^3 is an exponential tower of 3s which is 7,625,597,484,987 layers tall. You start with 1; raise 3 to the power of 1 to get 3; raise 3 to the power of 3 to get 27; raise 3 to the power of 27 to get 7625597484987; raise 3 to the power of 7625597484987 to get a number much larger than the number of atoms in the universe, but which could still be written down in base 10, on 100 square kilometers of paper; then raise 3 to that power; and continue until you've exponentiated 7625597484987 times. That's 3^^^3. It's the smallest simple inconceivably huge number I know." [1] That's a monumentally different setup than mere 7 billion humans on Earth. And it's making a point about the cold cruel calculus of moral utilitarianism, a very common and popular ethical position. Your disgust is precisely his rhetorical point... (Edit: ...about human heuristics and biases getting in the way of the moral calculus of utilitarianism. If you are a utilitarianist, there is some cutoff of X independent people -- for some very large X -- for which it is better to save that many people a slight inconvenience at the expense of 50 years of torture for one individual. This follows straight from the math of finite utilitarianism. Yudkowsky's position of trusting the math over intuition may not be intuitive for most people, but I'd be surprised if a HN reader did not agree at least with the methodology.) [1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/kn/torture_vs_dust_specks/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/kn/torture_vs_dust_specks/
- id 12y ago
  So annoying 3^^^3 people "for a fraction of a second, barely enough to make them notice" is worse than horribly torturing a single person for 50 years? Keep in mind that the 3^^^3 dust specks are spread across 3^^^3 people and their annoyance can't be simply added together.
  - maaku 12y ago
vesche 12y ago
>LessWrong is a site devoted to the cult of the "singularity." LessWrong is a discussion forum mostly pertaining to psychology, philosophy, cognitive biases, etc,. A frequent topic of discussion is artificial intelligence, but it is hardly centric. Saying that LessWrong is a hangout spot for "singularity cult members" (as you call them) is simply incorrect on multiple levels. Technological singularity is no more than a scientific hypothesis, and it's slightly dramatic to say it perhaps has cult members worshiping and breeding its realism. In actuality technological singularity just has scientists and researches observing/theorizing its stepping stones and outcomes. Maybe you meant transhumanists rather than "singularity cult members", which I suppose makes more since from your other statements. >Eliezer Yudkowsky, is a secular humanist who is probably most well-known for his Harry Potter fanfiction Yudkowsky is also a prominent researcher of a variety of artificial intelligence topics which is enhancing the field. Primarily he focuses not on developing a Strong AI (AGI), but rather focusing on safety issues that such a technology would pose. >the most important thing we could possibly be doing right now is devoting all of our time developing a mathematical model of a "safe AI." "friendly AI"* and I'm not sure what you're talking about when you say mathematical model, you should do more research it's mostly hypotheses and ideas for system transparency. >But I tend to take everything I read there with a massive grain of salt. Maybe you should visit LessWrong and read some articles about cognitive biases so you understand why someone saying "massive grain of salt" makes me want to kill innocent puppies.
- joesmo 12y ago
  > Primarily he focuses not on developing a Strong AI (AGI), but rather focusing on safety issues that such a technology would pose. That's absurd at worst, science fiction at best, akin to worrying about manned flight safety in the 1500's.
  - namnatulco 12y ago
    Are you really trying to deny that google cars and other automated systems at least partially based on AI have safety issues? Even if we're talking autonomous, "life-like" AI, there is a long list of interesting philosophical and legal questions to be asked. I can't say I find any of the statements here or in the article very appealing, but you shouldn't dismiss real safety/security issues just because you don't like the guy.
coldtea 12y ago
>His core beliefs include that the obvious goal of the human race is immortality, that it is justifiable to kill a man if it would remove a spec of dust from the eye of every other person on Earth, and that the most important thing we could possibly be doing right now is devoting all of our time developing a mathematical model of a "safe AI." Possitive proof that IQ doesn't equal smartness, much less wisdom.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Positive proof that you can make everything sound ridiculous if you half-assedly read about it, cherry-pick some sentences, and misinterpret them as it suits your preconceived opinions. Saying that GP's criticism is just inaccurate would be extremely charitable.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    >Positive proof that you can make everything sound ridiculous if you half-assedly read about it, cherry-pick some sentences, and misinterpret them as it suits your preconceived opinions. Sure. But I can't conceive ANY possible argumentation and further discussion that accepts the above points that is not also silly.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      I would have trouble doing that as well; fortunately, you should not accept the points above because they are either non-issues or seriously misrepresenting what Eliezer believes and ever wrote. It's fair to evaluate and criticize opinions, but as maaku said upthread, one should play fair.

lucisferre 12y ago

It's funny but this article is actually the strongest evidence of cult behaviour. Teaching you how to be "happy" is pretty much the initial selling point of almost every cult out there. Just walk by any Scientology building. Also from the wiki you linked [1] > Some people familiar with the LessWrong memeplex have suffered serious psychological distress after contemplating basilisk-like ideas — even when they're fairly sure intellectually that it's a silly problem.[5] The notion is taken sufficiently seriously by some LessWrong posters that they try to work out how to erase evidence of themselves so a future AI can't reconstruct a copy of them to torture Wow either that article is hyperbolizing this or... wow. [1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk#The_LessWrong_reaction http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk#The_LessWrong... [5] (reference from the quote) http://lesswrong.com/lw/fq3/open_thread_december_115_2012/80v8#20121230 http://lesswrong.com/lw/fq3/open_thread_december_115_2012/80...

TeMPOraL 12y ago
> It's funny but this article is actually the strongest evidence of cult behaviour. Teaching you how to be "happy" is pretty much the initial selling point of almost every cult out there. This is nonsense. It's an article posted to a curated community blog by some guy who happens to like reading tons of psychology papers and wanted to do some research into the state of scientific understanding of happiness. Is Wikipedia selling a cult too now[0]? [0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness
- maaku 12y ago
  > This is nonsense. It's an article posted to a curated community blog by some guy who happens to like reading tons of psychology papers and wanted to do some research into the state of scientific understanding of happiness... ...and is executive director of MIRI, the organization hosting and providing most of the content to Less Wrong.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Which would be an equivalent of pg posting his essay to HN, and then people accusing HNers of cultishness because of that essay. Hmm... actually, that happens every now and then and is exactly as fair as the accusations against lukeprog and LessWrong. Also, MIRI was created years after LessWrong.
    - maaku 12y ago
      MIRI is the continuation of SIAI which predates (and started) LessWrong.
      - dllthomas 12y ago
        Though Luke's involvement does not, not that that really means much.
davidgerard 12y ago
Luke didn't walk by Scientology, he walked in: http://lesswrong.com/lw/58m/build_small_skills_in_the_right_order/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/58m/build_small_skills_in_the_right_... You'll see me in the comments going "WHAT THE HELL, HERO."

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

rsaarelm 12y ago
I'm a member of their IRC channel and have no idea what the channel invasions thing is about. What have I been missing out on?

jeremyjh 12y ago

You forgot to take a jab at cryonics. Eliezer sincerely believes that people who do not sign-up their kids with a cryonics package are "lousy parents". http://lesswrong.com/lw/1mc/normal_cryonics/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/1mc/normal_cryonics/

eudox 12y ago
And there are people who sincerely believe cryonics is some sort of weird pipe dream. Can you believe it?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

spindritf 12y ago

You should take Slate[1] with an even bigger grain of salt. While Less Wrong is a canonical illustration of all the problems with high IQ people, at least they try to be accurate in their beliefs. Which is the actual purpose of the site. Singularity, consequentialism/utilitarianism, and so on are side effects. [1] I'm guessing http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/07/roko_s_basilisk_the_most_terrifying_thought_experiment_of_all_time.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/07/rok... right?

Jweb_Guru 12y ago
I'm not sure what you mean. I've been following LessWrong for a while now, but I've never seen that Slate article before. I should be clear that most posters do not agree with the idea itself, as it is fairly absurd. What's more interesting are the thought processes that might lead one to consider such an idea, which are in full evidence throughout the site.

Traubert 12y ago

> that it is justifiable to kill a man if it would remove a spec of dust from the eye of every other person on Earth Maybe Eliezer has argued that too, but I doubt it. He has said it about a much, much, much larger number of people than everyone on Earth.

Jweb_Guru 12y ago
Sure, it's probable that I'm misremembering the exact numbers. Though I realize that the numbers are critical to the proposition from his perspective, I think the fact that he would consider it at all probably differentiates his worldview from that of a lot of people.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  "Sure, it's probable that I'm misremembering the exact numbers." The exact number makes "the population of Earth" a tiny rounding error away from zero. Eliezer could be entirely right in his conclusion here ("core belief" is a gross mischaracterization - it follows from other things, not the other way around) and it could still be wrong to torture a man for a minute to spare dust specks in eyes of a billion Earths (and thats not even getting us much closer to the number in question). That he would consider it at all differentiates his thinking only from those who don't think about these things. "What happens in the extreme?" is a useful question, when trying to pin down how systems work.

adamzerner 12y ago

Maybe you disagree with some of the conclusions, but do you disagree with the methods it preaches? Ie. reductionism, awareness of our biases, bayesian inference. There do seem to be a lot of extreme viewpoints on LessWrong, so I think it is justified to take those extreme viewpoints with a grain of salt. But I also think that the core beliefs/approaches are valid, and so that should be factored in to how big a grain of salt you take things with.

Jweb_Guru 12y ago
I think they're probably a little too focused on the Bayesian interpretation, but yes, the site has plenty of good content. In particular, it is a really excellent way of finding effective charities. Where the site goes astray is that it has its own preconceived biases--e.g. its priors for the eventual development of a transhuman AI.

skrebbel 12y ago

I agree with the grain of salt, but you're being overly dismissive. Calling them a cult surely is over the top. It's just a bunch of grumpy nerds with a somewhat hardline "rational" fanaticism, who love to spend late dark nights on the internet reasoning about stuff.

abraxasz 12y ago

I agree with your remarks. One reason, however, why I still enjoy reading articles on the site from time to time is that they almost always make me think. Their perspectives, however flawed, have the merit of being strongly coherent, and trying to find what's wrong with an article turns out to be a very good exercise in judgment.

mhb 12y ago

Where have Drexler's nanobots been credibly discredited?

davidgerard 12y ago
Every real-world chemist who looks into the idea.
- mhb 12y ago
  And yet, surprisingly, you don't have a reference.

JamesArgo 12y ago

I do not understand why there are so many haters of LessWrong. It's not a cult. No one on that site has ever bought into the Roko idea. Also, Roko's post is poorly explained there. However, everyone thought it was nonsense at the time and still does. Imagine if the most inane nonsense posted to hacker news was used to dismiss everyone who posts here. As for nanotechnology. It is possible - biology is a proof of that - though some of the early visions may have been naive. It's likely that artificial systems can be created using a broader pallet than natural selection does, and that these technologies will be powerful. >That it is justifiable to kill a man if it would remove a spec of dust from the eye of every other person on Earth No, he wrote that it was justifiable to torture a man to prevent 3^^^3 dust specs from floating into 3^^^3 eyes. 3^^^3 is a mind-bogglingly large number - far far far far far more than everyone on earth.

vertex-four 12y ago
> I do not understand why there are so many haters of LessWrong. A lot of us have ended up in places where they have tried to force their beliefs on us (a huge one being "debate is always the correct way to understand things, and is never inappropriate in any situation ever" - the concept of, say, cooperative discussion, or even caring about people's emotions and sense of self, seems to have never occurred to any of them that I have met). It's rather understandable that many would see them as a cult, given the religious fervour that many of them have in forcing their beliefs on others.
- JamesArgo 12y ago
  >Or even caring about people's emotions and sense of self, seems to have never occurred to any of them that I have met. But that's not relevant to a community focusing on rational discussion. And it's the exact opposite of what cults do - they try to shower their followers with love. Not caring too much about people's emotional attachments to their beliefs is appropriate on LessWrong. It is inappropriate outside of that context.
  - vertex-four 12y ago

maaku 12y ago

Play fair. > His core beliefs include that the obvious goal of the human race is immortality "We should be allowed to live as long as we want to." Emphasis on the want. I don't find that very controversial. > that it is justifiable to kill a man if it would remove a spec of dust from the eye of every other person on Earth No, the setup was one person's torture for 50 years (not death), or specks of dust in the eyes of 3^^^3 people. How much is 3^^^3 people? * 3^3 = 27. * 3^^3 = (3^(3^3)) = 3^27 = 7625597484987. * 3^^^3 = (3^^(3^^3)) = 3^^7625597484987 = (3^(3^(3^(... 7625597484987 times ...)))). "3^^^3 is an exponential tower of 3s which is 7,625,597,484,987 layers tall. You start with 1; raise 3 to the power of 1 to get 3; raise 3 to the power of 3 to get 27; raise 3 to the power of 27 to get 7625597484987; raise 3 to the power of 7625597484987 to get a number much larger than the number of atoms in the universe, but which could still be written down in base 10, on 100 square kilometers of paper; then raise 3 to that power; and continue until you've exponentiated 7625597484987 times. That's 3^^^3. It's the smallest simple inconceivably huge number I know." [1] That's a monumentally different setup than mere 7 billion humans on Earth. And it's making a point about the cold cruel calculus of moral utilitarianism, a very common and popular ethical position. Your disgust is precisely his rhetorical point... (Edit: ...about human heuristics and biases getting in the way of the moral calculus of utilitarianism. If you are a utilitarianist, there is some cutoff of X independent people -- for some very large X -- for which it is better to save that many people a slight inconvenience at the expense of 50 years of torture for one individual. This follows straight from the math of finite utilitarianism. Yudkowsky's position of trusting the math over intuition may not be intuitive for most people, but I'd be surprised if a HN reader did not agree at least with the methodology.) [1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/kn/torture_vs_dust_specks/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/kn/torture_vs_dust_specks/

id 12y ago
So annoying 3^^^3 people "for a fraction of a second, barely enough to make them notice" is worse than horribly torturing a single person for 50 years? Keep in mind that the 3^^^3 dust specks are spread across 3^^^3 people and their annoyance can't be simply added together.
- maaku 12y ago

vesche 12y ago

>LessWrong is a site devoted to the cult of the "singularity." LessWrong is a discussion forum mostly pertaining to psychology, philosophy, cognitive biases, etc,. A frequent topic of discussion is artificial intelligence, but it is hardly centric. Saying that LessWrong is a hangout spot for "singularity cult members" (as you call them) is simply incorrect on multiple levels. Technological singularity is no more than a scientific hypothesis, and it's slightly dramatic to say it perhaps has cult members worshiping and breeding its realism. In actuality technological singularity just has scientists and researches observing/theorizing its stepping stones and outcomes. Maybe you meant transhumanists rather than "singularity cult members", which I suppose makes more since from your other statements. >Eliezer Yudkowsky, is a secular humanist who is probably most well-known for his Harry Potter fanfiction Yudkowsky is also a prominent researcher of a variety of artificial intelligence topics which is enhancing the field. Primarily he focuses not on developing a Strong AI (AGI), but rather focusing on safety issues that such a technology would pose. >the most important thing we could possibly be doing right now is devoting all of our time developing a mathematical model of a "safe AI." "friendly AI"* and I'm not sure what you're talking about when you say mathematical model, you should do more research it's mostly hypotheses and ideas for system transparency. >But I tend to take everything I read there with a massive grain of salt. Maybe you should visit LessWrong and read some articles about cognitive biases so you understand why someone saying "massive grain of salt" makes me want to kill innocent puppies.

joesmo 12y ago
> Primarily he focuses not on developing a Strong AI (AGI), but rather focusing on safety issues that such a technology would pose. That's absurd at worst, science fiction at best, akin to worrying about manned flight safety in the 1500's.
- namnatulco 12y ago
  Are you really trying to deny that google cars and other automated systems at least partially based on AI have safety issues? Even if we're talking autonomous, "life-like" AI, there is a long list of interesting philosophical and legal questions to be asked. I can't say I find any of the statements here or in the article very appealing, but you shouldn't dismiss real safety/security issues just because you don't like the guy.

coldtea 12y ago

>His core beliefs include that the obvious goal of the human race is immortality, that it is justifiable to kill a man if it would remove a spec of dust from the eye of every other person on Earth, and that the most important thing we could possibly be doing right now is devoting all of our time developing a mathematical model of a "safe AI." Possitive proof that IQ doesn't equal smartness, much less wisdom.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
Positive proof that you can make everything sound ridiculous if you half-assedly read about it, cherry-pick some sentences, and misinterpret them as it suits your preconceived opinions. Saying that GP's criticism is just inaccurate would be extremely charitable.
- coldtea 12y ago
  >Positive proof that you can make everything sound ridiculous if you half-assedly read about it, cherry-pick some sentences, and misinterpret them as it suits your preconceived opinions. Sure. But I can't conceive ANY possible argumentation and further discussion that accepts the above points that is not also silly.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    I would have trouble doing that as well; fortunately, you should not accept the points above because they are either non-issues or seriously misrepresenting what Eliezer believes and ever wrote. It's fair to evaluate and criticize opinions, but as maaku said upthread, one should play fair.