People don’t gain ability to program out of empty air… everyone able to program has long list of various working projects that they trained on. In any case, programming is real work, it is annoying, it takes training, it takes education, it slaps your ego on the nose just about every time you hit compile after writing any interesting code. And the newbies are grossly mistaken about their abilities. You can’t trust anyone to measure their skills accurately, let alone report them.
Are you claiming (a non-negligible probability) that Eliezer would be a worse programmer if he’d decided to take up programming instead of AI research (perhaps because he would have worked on boring projects and given up?), or that he isn’t competent enough to get hired as a programmer now?
People don’t gain ability to program out of empty air… everyone able to program has long list of various working projects that they trained on. In any case, programming is real work, it is annoying, it takes training, it takes education, it slaps your ego on the nose just about every time you hit compile after writing any interesting code. And the newbies are grossly mistaken about their abilities. You can’t trust anyone to measure their skills accurately, let alone report them.
Are you claiming (a non-negligible probability) that Eliezer would be a worse programmer if he’d decided to take up programming instead of AI research (perhaps because he would have worked on boring projects and given up?), or that he isn’t competent enough to get hired as a programmer now?