So I guess I’d ask this a different way: if you were an ethical philosopher whose positions disagreed with EY, what in this community would encourage you to post (or comment) about your disagreements?
Caring about the future of humanity, I suppose, and thinking that SIAI’s choices may have a big impact on the future of humanity. That’s what motivates me to post my disagreements—in an effort to figure out what’s correct.
Unfortunately, believing that the SIAI is likely to have a significant impact on the future of humanity already implies accepting many of its core claims: that the intelligence-explosion view of the singularity is accurate, that special measures to produce a friendly AI are feasible and necessary, and that the SIAI has enough good ideas that it has a reasonable chance of not being beaten to the punch by some other project. Otherwise it’s either chasing a fantasy or going after a real goal in a badly suboptimal way, and either way it’s not worth spending effort on influencing.
That still leaves plenty of room for disagreement with Eliezer, theoretically, but it narrows the search space enough that I’m not sure there are many talented ethical philosophers left in it whose views diverge significantly from the SIAI party line. There aren’t so many ethical philosophers in the world that a problem this specialized is going to attract very many of them.
As a corollary, I think it’s a good idea to downplay the SIAI applications of this site. Human rationality is a much broader topic than the kind of formal ethics that go into the SIAI’s work, and seems more likely to attract interesting and varied attention.
Caring about the future of humanity, I suppose, and thinking that SIAI’s choices may have a big impact on the future of humanity. That’s what motivates me to post my disagreements—in an effort to figure out what’s correct.
Unfortunately, believing that the SIAI is likely to have a significant impact on the future of humanity already implies accepting many of its core claims: that the intelligence-explosion view of the singularity is accurate, that special measures to produce a friendly AI are feasible and necessary, and that the SIAI has enough good ideas that it has a reasonable chance of not being beaten to the punch by some other project. Otherwise it’s either chasing a fantasy or going after a real goal in a badly suboptimal way, and either way it’s not worth spending effort on influencing.
That still leaves plenty of room for disagreement with Eliezer, theoretically, but it narrows the search space enough that I’m not sure there are many talented ethical philosophers left in it whose views diverge significantly from the SIAI party line. There aren’t so many ethical philosophers in the world that a problem this specialized is going to attract very many of them.
As a corollary, I think it’s a good idea to downplay the SIAI applications of this site. Human rationality is a much broader topic than the kind of formal ethics that go into the SIAI’s work, and seems more likely to attract interesting and varied attention.