I myself employ a very strong heuristic, from years of trolling the internet: when a user joins a forum and complains about an out-of-character and strongly personal persecution by the moderation staff in the past, there is virtually always more to the story when you look into it.
Indeed, Dolores, that is an empirically sound strategy, if used with caution.
My own experience, however, is that people who do that can usually be googled quickly, and are often found to be unqualified cranks of one persuasion or another. People with more anger than self-control.
But that is not always the case. Recently, for example, a woman friended me on Facebook and then posted numerous diatribes against a respected academic acquaintance of mine, accusing him of raping her and fathering her child. These posts were quite blood-curdling. And their target appeared quite the most innocent guy you could imagine. Very difficult to make a judgement. However, about a month ago the guy suddenly came out and made a full and embarrassing frank admission of guilt. It was an astonishing episode. But it was an instance of one of those rare occasions when the person (the woman in this case) turned out to be perfectly justified.
I am helpless to convince you. All I can do is point to my own qualifications and standing. I am no lone crank crying in the wilderness. I teach Math, Physics and Cognitive Neuroscience at the undergraduate level, and I have coauthored a paper with one of the AGI field’s leading exponents (Ben Goertzel), in a book about the Singularity that was at one point (maybe not anymore!) slated to be a publishing landmark for the field. You have to make a judgement.
Regardless of who was how much at fault in the SL4 incident, surely you must admit that Yudkowsky’s interactions with you were unusually hostile relative to how he generally interacts with critics. I can see how you’d want to place emphasis on those interactions because they involved you personally, but that doesn’t make them representative for purposes of judging cultishness or making general claims that “dissent is ruthlessly suppressed”.
Steven. That does make it seem as though the only thing worth complaining about was the “unusually” hostile EY behavior on that occasion. As if it were exceptional, not repeated before or since.
But that is inaccurate. That episode was the culmination of a long sequence of derogatory remarks. So that is what came before.
What came after? I have made a number of attempts to open a dialog on the important issue at hand, which is not the personal conflict but the question of AGI motivation systems. My attempts have been rebuffed. And instead I have been subjected to repeated attacks by SI members.
That would be six years of repeated attacks.
So portraying it as an isolated incident is not factually correct. Which was my point, of course.
I’m interested in any compiled papers or articles you wrote about AGI motivation systems, aside from the forthcoming book chapter, which I will read. Do you have any links?
I myself employ a very strong heuristic, from years of trolling the internet: when a user joins a forum and complains about an out-of-character and strongly personal persecution by the moderation staff in the past, there is virtually always more to the story when you look into it.
Indeed, Dolores, that is an empirically sound strategy, if used with caution.
My own experience, however, is that people who do that can usually be googled quickly, and are often found to be unqualified cranks of one persuasion or another. People with more anger than self-control.
But that is not always the case. Recently, for example, a woman friended me on Facebook and then posted numerous diatribes against a respected academic acquaintance of mine, accusing him of raping her and fathering her child. These posts were quite blood-curdling. And their target appeared quite the most innocent guy you could imagine. Very difficult to make a judgement. However, about a month ago the guy suddenly came out and made a full and embarrassing frank admission of guilt. It was an astonishing episode. But it was an instance of one of those rare occasions when the person (the woman in this case) turned out to be perfectly justified.
I am helpless to convince you. All I can do is point to my own qualifications and standing. I am no lone crank crying in the wilderness. I teach Math, Physics and Cognitive Neuroscience at the undergraduate level, and I have coauthored a paper with one of the AGI field’s leading exponents (Ben Goertzel), in a book about the Singularity that was at one point (maybe not anymore!) slated to be a publishing landmark for the field. You have to make a judgement.
Regardless of who was how much at fault in the SL4 incident, surely you must admit that Yudkowsky’s interactions with you were unusually hostile relative to how he generally interacts with critics. I can see how you’d want to place emphasis on those interactions because they involved you personally, but that doesn’t make them representative for purposes of judging cultishness or making general claims that “dissent is ruthlessly suppressed”.
Steven. That does make it seem as though the only thing worth complaining about was the “unusually” hostile EY behavior on that occasion. As if it were exceptional, not repeated before or since.
But that is inaccurate. That episode was the culmination of a long sequence of derogatory remarks. So that is what came before.
What came after? I have made a number of attempts to open a dialog on the important issue at hand, which is not the personal conflict but the question of AGI motivation systems. My attempts have been rebuffed. And instead I have been subjected to repeated attacks by SI members.
That would be six years of repeated attacks.
So portraying it as an isolated incident is not factually correct. Which was my point, of course.
I’m interested in any compiled papers or articles you wrote about AGI motivation systems, aside from the forthcoming book chapter, which I will read. Do you have any links?
http://susaro.com/