I’ve never seen anything from Eliezer that proves that he’s done anything at all of value except be a rationality teacher. I know of two general criteria by which to judge someone’s output in a field that I am not a part of:
1) Academic prestige (degrees, publications, etc.)
and
2) Economic output (making things that people will pay money for).
Eliezer’s institution doesn’t sell anything, so he’s a loss on part 2. He doesn’t have a Ph.D or any academic papers I can find, so he’s a loss on part 1, as well. Can SIAI demonstrate that it’s done anything except beg for money, put up a nice-looking website, organize some symposiums, and write some very good essays?
To be honest, I’d say that his output matches the job description of “philosopher” than “engineer” or “scientist”. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Many works that fall broadly under the metric of philosophy have been tremendously influential. For example, Adam Smith was a philosopher.
Eliezer seems to have talents both for seeing through confusion (and its cousin, bullshit) and for being able to explain complicated things in ways that people can understand. In other words, he’d be an amazing university professor. I just haven’t seen him prove that he can do anything else.
EY has a lengthy article in this volume if that counts as academic.
As has been said, being a theoretician seems distinct enough from teaching that it should count as a day job. I still view Eliezer as more of a teacher than a theoretician, but I don’t think Eliezer is saying teachers don’t have to be completely divorced from their subject in their day job to avoid affective death spirals.
I’ve never seen anything from Eliezer that proves that he’s done anything at all of value except be a rationality teacher. I know of two general criteria by which to judge someone’s output in a field that I am not a part of:
1) Academic prestige (degrees, publications, etc.) and 2) Economic output (making things that people will pay money for).
Eliezer’s institution doesn’t sell anything, so he’s a loss on part 2. He doesn’t have a Ph.D or any academic papers I can find, so he’s a loss on part 1, as well. Can SIAI demonstrate that it’s done anything except beg for money, put up a nice-looking website, organize some symposiums, and write some very good essays?
To be honest, I’d say that his output matches the job description of “philosopher” than “engineer” or “scientist”. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Many works that fall broadly under the metric of philosophy have been tremendously influential. For example, Adam Smith was a philosopher.
Eliezer seems to have talents both for seeing through confusion (and its cousin, bullshit) and for being able to explain complicated things in ways that people can understand. In other words, he’d be an amazing university professor. I just haven’t seen him prove that he can do anything else.
Yes—in fact, the only thing that leads me to suspect that EY and SIAI are doing anything worth doing is the quality of EY’s writings on rationality.
EY has a lengthy article in this volume if that counts as academic.
As has been said, being a theoretician seems distinct enough from teaching that it should count as a day job. I still view Eliezer as more of a teacher than a theoretician, but I don’t think Eliezer is saying teachers don’t have to be completely divorced from their subject in their day job to avoid affective death spirals.