Bostrom’s Superintelligence was a frustrating read because it makes barely any claims, it spends most of the time making possible conceptual distinctions, which aren’t really falsifiable. It is difficult to know how to engage with it. I think this problem is underlying in a bunch of the LW stuff too. In contrast, The Age of Em made the opposite error, it was full of things presented as firm claims, so many that most people seemed to just gloss the whole thing as crazy. I think most of the highly engaged with material in academia goes for a specific format along this dimension whereby it makes a very limited number of claims and attempts to provide overwhelming evidence for them. This creates many foot holds for engagement.
Thank you—I do think you are pinpointing a genuine problem here. And it is also putting into context for me why this pattern of behaviour so adored by academia is not done here. If you are dealing with long term scenarios, with uncertain ones, with novel ones with many unknowns, but where a lot is at stake—and a lot of the things Less Wrong is concerned with are just that—then if you agree to only proclaim what is certain, and to only restrict yourself to things you can, with the tools currently available, completely tackle and clearly define, carving out tiny portions of this that are already unassailable, to enter into long-term publication processes… you will miss the calamity you are concerned about entirely. There is too much danger with too little data and too little time to be perfectly certain, but too much seems highly plausible to hold off on. But as a result, what one produces is rushed, incomplete, vague, full of holes, and often not immediately applicable, or published, so it can be dismissed. Yet people who pass through academia have been told again and again to hold off on the large questions that led them there, to pursue extremely narrow ones, and to value the life-saving, useful and precise results that have been so carefully checked; pursuing big questions if often weeded out in the Bachelor degree already, so doing so seems unprofessional.
I wonder if there is a specific, small thing that would make a huge impact if taken seriously by academia, but that is itself narrow enough that it can be completed with a sufficient amount of certainty and rigour and completeness, with the broader implications strongly implied in the outlook after that firm base has been established. Or rather, which might be the wisest choice here. - Thanks a lot, that was really insightful.
Bostrom’s Superintelligence was a frustrating read because it makes barely any claims, it spends most of the time making possible conceptual distinctions, which aren’t really falsifiable. It is difficult to know how to engage with it. I think this problem is underlying in a bunch of the LW stuff too. In contrast, The Age of Em made the opposite error, it was full of things presented as firm claims, so many that most people seemed to just gloss the whole thing as crazy. I think most of the highly engaged with material in academia goes for a specific format along this dimension whereby it makes a very limited number of claims and attempts to provide overwhelming evidence for them. This creates many foot holds for engagement.
Thank you—I do think you are pinpointing a genuine problem here. And it is also putting into context for me why this pattern of behaviour so adored by academia is not done here. If you are dealing with long term scenarios, with uncertain ones, with novel ones with many unknowns, but where a lot is at stake—and a lot of the things Less Wrong is concerned with are just that—then if you agree to only proclaim what is certain, and to only restrict yourself to things you can, with the tools currently available, completely tackle and clearly define, carving out tiny portions of this that are already unassailable, to enter into long-term publication processes… you will miss the calamity you are concerned about entirely. There is too much danger with too little data and too little time to be perfectly certain, but too much seems highly plausible to hold off on. But as a result, what one produces is rushed, incomplete, vague, full of holes, and often not immediately applicable, or published, so it can be dismissed. Yet people who pass through academia have been told again and again to hold off on the large questions that led them there, to pursue extremely narrow ones, and to value the life-saving, useful and precise results that have been so carefully checked; pursuing big questions if often weeded out in the Bachelor degree already, so doing so seems unprofessional.
I wonder if there is a specific, small thing that would make a huge impact if taken seriously by academia, but that is itself narrow enough that it can be completed with a sufficient amount of certainty and rigour and completeness, with the broader implications strongly implied in the outlook after that firm base has been established. Or rather, which might be the wisest choice here. - Thanks a lot, that was really insightful.