It’s great to see that you’re doing this. I think it’s incredibly valuable to formulate, clarify, and argue in structured format like this. Keep going! Here are some comments, I haven’t held back :)
If you want to reach, be taken seriously by, and convince the kind of audience for which Chalmers’ paper was intended then you need to get much more careful and meticulous in your analysis.
In your first paragraph you give excited accounts of some successes in AI. This is fine for scene-setting in mainstream literature but if you’re going to cite these in an academic setting then you need to expand and deepen your description of them.
Each subsequent paragraph takes quite gigantic analytical steps. To someone that isn’t already familiar with the topic, it’s not clear the extent to which your citations back up your claims (one might just think they define terms or provide some weak corroboration). You could say things like “Bostrom shows...” or “Yudkowsky has developed...”. Even if you target an audience that is already familiar with this area I think it’s worth greatly expanding this introductory area.
Since you’re going to use singletons deeply within your analysis it would be well worth giving a clear and concise definition rather than only citing Bostrom.
Again, I’m not sure how relevant this is to your goals, but if you’re trying to reach some kind of academic audience a la Chalmers’ paper, then you should probably say “we will argue in chapter X that …”
You are also making lots of specific claims, .e.g “unless a global catastrophe stop scientific progress”—are there really no other scenarios? In constructing a well-reasoned argument, you want to avoid as much of this unnecessary vulnerability—people will quote this out of context and then dismiss your entire book
I repeat that this is the intro. I don’t argue for anything here. That comes later. Read the openings of any other academic work. They do not contain arguments. They contain previews of what will be argued.
He seems to be going into details about those other points in part 2, which he already posted.
Interestingly, I think he should go into less details about those scenarios, to avoid boring his audience and losing them in irrelevant detail. Which goes to show there’s no pleasing everybody.
It’s great to see that you’re doing this. I think it’s incredibly valuable to formulate, clarify, and argue in structured format like this. Keep going! Here are some comments, I haven’t held back :)
If you want to reach, be taken seriously by, and convince the kind of audience for which Chalmers’ paper was intended then you need to get much more careful and meticulous in your analysis.
In your first paragraph you give excited accounts of some successes in AI. This is fine for scene-setting in mainstream literature but if you’re going to cite these in an academic setting then you need to expand and deepen your description of them.
Each subsequent paragraph takes quite gigantic analytical steps. To someone that isn’t already familiar with the topic, it’s not clear the extent to which your citations back up your claims (one might just think they define terms or provide some weak corroboration). You could say things like “Bostrom shows...” or “Yudkowsky has developed...”. Even if you target an audience that is already familiar with this area I think it’s worth greatly expanding this introductory area.
Since you’re going to use singletons deeply within your analysis it would be well worth giving a clear and concise definition rather than only citing Bostrom.
Yeah; this is only the intro. I’m going to revisit all this material in more detail in the very next section.
Again, I’m not sure how relevant this is to your goals, but if you’re trying to reach some kind of academic audience a la Chalmers’ paper, then you should probably say “we will argue in chapter X that …”
You are also making lots of specific claims, .e.g “unless a global catastrophe stop scientific progress”—are there really no other scenarios? In constructing a well-reasoned argument, you want to avoid as much of this unnecessary vulnerability—people will quote this out of context and then dismiss your entire book
I repeat that this is the intro. I don’t argue for anything here. That comes later. Read the openings of any other academic work. They do not contain arguments. They contain previews of what will be argued.
He seems to be going into details about those other points in part 2, which he already posted.
Interestingly, I think he should go into less details about those scenarios, to avoid boring his audience and losing them in irrelevant detail. Which goes to show there’s no pleasing everybody.
Yeah, like most books for academics, this is definitely a book only for people who are highly interested in this very narrow topic.