It sounds to me like some of the criticisms of this can be extended to much of LW’s unusual ideas, such as the nature of the unfriendly AI danger and its solution: invented by amateurs, not peer reviewed, unknown outside of this community, etc.
I’d say Nick Bostrom (a respected professor at Oxford) writing Superintelligence (and otherwise working on the project), this (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/495759307346952192), some high profile research associates and workshop attendees (Max Tegmark, John Baez, quite a number of Google engineers), give FAI much more legitimacy than connection theory.
note that it took MIRI quite a long time to get where they are now, about 7 years? in those years FAI was very hard to communicate, but the situation is better now.
I suspect a similar thing may be going on with connection theory, as most of the critics of it don’t seem to know very much about it, but are quick to criticize.
It sounds to me like some of the criticisms of this can be extended to much of LW’s unusual ideas, such as the nature of the unfriendly AI danger and its solution: invented by amateurs, not peer reviewed, unknown outside of this community, etc.
I’d say Nick Bostrom (a respected professor at Oxford) writing Superintelligence (and otherwise working on the project), this (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/495759307346952192), some high profile research associates and workshop attendees (Max Tegmark, John Baez, quite a number of Google engineers), give FAI much more legitimacy than connection theory.
note that it took MIRI quite a long time to get where they are now, about 7 years? in those years FAI was very hard to communicate, but the situation is better now.
I suspect a similar thing may be going on with connection theory, as most of the critics of it don’t seem to know very much about it, but are quick to criticize.
Also cryonics, paleo/low-carbs/ketogenic diets, various self-help/life-hacking/PUA stuff, etc.