I certainly think that positioning the philosophical foundations assumed by the quest for Friendly AI would give SIAI more credibility in academic circles. But right now SIAI seems to be very anti-academia in some ways, which I think is unfortunate.
But right now SIAI seems to be very anti-academia in some ways,
I really don’t think it is, as a whole. Vassar and Yudkowsky are somewhat, but there are other people within and closely associated with the organization who are actively trying to get papers published, etc. And EY himself just gave a couple of talks at Oxford, so I understand.
(In fact it would probably be more accurate to say that academia is somewhat more anti-SIAI than the other way around, at the moment.)
As for EY’s book, my understanding is that it is targeted at popular rather than academic audiences, so it presumably won’t be appropriate for it to trace the philosophical history of all the ideas contained therein, at least not in detail. But there’s no reason it can’t be done elsewhere.
I’m thinking of what Dennett did in Consciousness Explained, where he put all the academic-philosophy stuff in an appendix so that people interested in how his stuff relates to the broader philosophical discourse can follow that, and people not interested in it can ignore it.
You and EY might find it particularly useful to provide such an annotation as an appendix for the material that he’s assembling into his book.
Or not.
I certainly think that positioning the philosophical foundations assumed by the quest for Friendly AI would give SIAI more credibility in academic circles. But right now SIAI seems to be very anti-academia in some ways, which I think is unfortunate.
I really don’t think it is, as a whole. Vassar and Yudkowsky are somewhat, but there are other people within and closely associated with the organization who are actively trying to get papers published, etc. And EY himself just gave a couple of talks at Oxford, so I understand.
(In fact it would probably be more accurate to say that academia is somewhat more anti-SIAI than the other way around, at the moment.)
As for EY’s book, my understanding is that it is targeted at popular rather than academic audiences, so it presumably won’t be appropriate for it to trace the philosophical history of all the ideas contained therein, at least not in detail. But there’s no reason it can’t be done elsewhere.
I’m thinking of what Dennett did in Consciousness Explained, where he put all the academic-philosophy stuff in an appendix so that people interested in how his stuff relates to the broader philosophical discourse can follow that, and people not interested in it can ignore it.