post review: single upvote—while this is a perfectly acceptable intro for some audiences, if it’s meant for general consumption, it feels both too technical and not technical enough. It feels far too long to me for the level of attention it would warrant until it has made its initial argument. worse, I don’t have any suggestions for how to fix it coming to mind right now—I comment in the hope that someone else has better suggestions.
please keep my comment near the bottom so real suggestions displace it.
I think this post is good for general consumption (if we’re thinking of general consumption as can be read and understood by the median college student). I think the ideal format for this post if targeted at that audience is probably different though—ideally, a lot of the text would be collapsible and hidden by default unless people want to read the longer explanation. So someone coming across this post could quickly understand the structure of the argument and then dive deeper into the sections they are unconvinced by or that feel unclear.
The article HAS to be long because it’s so hard to imagine such a thing happening. Right now, software is diabolically bad in the exact opposite way being described in the article. Meaning current software is so defective, opaque, bloated, hard to use, slow, inscrutable and intensely frustrating that it seems society might collapse from a kind of informational cancer instead.
reasonable-ish, though I would claim that the article needing to be long doesn’t obviate the need for a hook in the intro that justifies itself honestly. honestly, though, it seems to me that a superintelligent system would have exactly the same kind of informational cancer, the worry could be poetically summarized as superintelligence is like injecting a massive overdose of growth hormone into an already cancer-afflicted patient.
post review: single upvote—while this is a perfectly acceptable intro for some audiences, if it’s meant for general consumption, it feels both too technical and not technical enough. It feels far too long to me for the level of attention it would warrant until it has made its initial argument. worse, I don’t have any suggestions for how to fix it coming to mind right now—I comment in the hope that someone else has better suggestions.
please keep my comment near the bottom so real suggestions displace it.
I think this post is good for general consumption (if we’re thinking of general consumption as can be read and understood by the median college student). I think the ideal format for this post if targeted at that audience is probably different though—ideally, a lot of the text would be collapsible and hidden by default unless people want to read the longer explanation. So someone coming across this post could quickly understand the structure of the argument and then dive deeper into the sections they are unconvinced by or that feel unclear.
The article HAS to be long because it’s so hard to imagine such a thing happening. Right now, software is diabolically bad in the exact opposite way being described in the article. Meaning current software is so defective, opaque, bloated, hard to use, slow, inscrutable and intensely frustrating that it seems society might collapse from a kind of informational cancer instead.
reasonable-ish, though I would claim that the article needing to be long doesn’t obviate the need for a hook in the intro that justifies itself honestly. honestly, though, it seems to me that a superintelligent system would have exactly the same kind of informational cancer, the worry could be poetically summarized as superintelligence is like injecting a massive overdose of growth hormone into an already cancer-afflicted patient.