Eliezer Yudkowsky has made the claim “A Bayesian superintelligence, hooked up to a webcam, would invent General Relativity as a hypothesis—perhaps not the dominant hypothesis, compared to Newtonian mechanics, but still a hypothesis under direct consideration—by the time it had seen the third frame of a falling apple. It might guess it from the first frame, if it saw the statics of a bent blade of grass.”
This is one of those grandiose and silly claims that gives this site a bad rap. There is no way to prove this statement of faith in Bayesian Superintelligence (BS for short), because: there is no BS (ehm...) around to test it with, and even if there were, the setup itself (BS+webcam) is so ridiculous, it would never be tried. Anyway, as far as I know, Eliezer’s absolute faith in Bayesianism is not shared by anyone else at MIRI/CFAR, at least not nearly as fervently.
This is one of those grandiose and silly claims that gives this site a bad rap. There is no way to prove this statement of faith in Bayesian Superintelligence (BS for short), because: there is no BS (ehm...) around to test it with, and even if there were, the setup itself (BS+webcam) is so ridiculous, it would never be tried. Anyway, as far as I know, Eliezer’s absolute faith in Bayesianism is not shared by anyone else at MIRI/CFAR, at least not nearly as fervently.