Eliezer, yes McDermott had useful and witty critiques of then current practice, but that was far from suggesting this entire generation of researchers were mystic idiots; McDermott said:
Most AI workers are responsible people who are aware of the pitfalls of a difficult field and produce good work in spite of them.
You come across sometimes as suggesting that the old-timer approach to AI was a hopeless waste, so that their modest rate of progress has little to say about expected future progress. And the fact that people used suggestive names when programming seems prime evidence to you. To answer your direct question as precisely as posssible, I assert that while many researchers did at times suffer the biases McDermott mentioned, this did not reduce the rate of progress by more than a factor of two.
Eliezer, yes McDermott had useful and witty critiques of then current practice, but that was far from suggesting this entire generation of researchers were mystic idiots; McDermott said:
You come across sometimes as suggesting that the old-timer approach to AI was a hopeless waste, so that their modest rate of progress has little to say about expected future progress. And the fact that people used suggestive names when programming seems prime evidence to you. To answer your direct question as precisely as posssible, I assert that while many researchers did at times suffer the biases McDermott mentioned, this did not reduce the rate of progress by more than a factor of two.