Re: “haphazard musings of a high school dropout, who has never written a single computer program but professes to be an expert on AI.”
This opinion sounds poorly researched—e.g.: “This document was created by html2html, a Python script written by Eliezer S. Yudkowsky.”—http://yudkowsky.net/obsolete/plan.html
I posted that quote to put it into perspective as to what others think of EY and his movement compared to what he thinks about them. Given that he thinks the same about those people, i.e. their opinion isn’t worth much and that the LW crowd is much smarter anyway, it highlights an important aspect of the almost non-existing cooperation between him and the academics.
I don’t think one possibly-trivial Python script (to which I am unable to find source code) counts as much evidence. It sets a lower bound, but a very loose one. I have no idea whether Eliezer can program, and my prior says that any given person is extremely unlikely to have real programming ability unless proven otherwise. So I assume he can’t.
He could change my mind by either publishing a large software project, or taking a standardized programming test such as a TopCoder SRM and publishing his score.
EDIT: This is not meant to be a defense of obvious wrong hyperbole like “has never written a single computer program”.
Eliezer has faced this criticism before and responded (somewhere!). I expect he will figure out coding. I got better at programming over the first 15 years I was doing it. So: he may also take a while to get up to speed. He was involved in this:
Re: “haphazard musings of a high school dropout, who has never written a single computer program but professes to be an expert on AI.”
This opinion sounds poorly researched—e.g.: “This document was created by html2html, a Python script written by Eliezer S. Yudkowsky.”—http://yudkowsky.net/obsolete/plan.html
I posted that quote to put it into perspective as to what others think of EY and his movement compared to what he thinks about them. Given that he thinks the same about those people, i.e. their opinion isn’t worth much and that the LW crowd is much smarter anyway, it highlights an important aspect of the almost non-existing cooperation between him and the academics.
I don’t think one possibly-trivial Python script (to which I am unable to find source code) counts as much evidence. It sets a lower bound, but a very loose one. I have no idea whether Eliezer can program, and my prior says that any given person is extremely unlikely to have real programming ability unless proven otherwise. So I assume he can’t.
He could change my mind by either publishing a large software project, or taking a standardized programming test such as a TopCoder SRM and publishing his score.
EDIT: This is not meant to be a defense of obvious wrong hyperbole like “has never written a single computer program”.
Eliezer has faced this criticism before and responded (somewhere!). I expect he will figure out coding. I got better at programming over the first 15 years I was doing it. So: he may also take a while to get up to speed. He was involved in this:
http://flarelang.sourceforge.net/