From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Jul 22 2003 - 07:03:29 MDT
Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
>
> Which raises some interesting questions -- Eliezer's or Robin's
> hubris is justified, generally apparent and is an aspect of
> their personalities that one includes in "who they are" (completely
> justified IMO). But one has to wonder (at least I do) -- where
> is Anders' hubris? Is it accumulating somewhere? Is it lurking,
> waiting to spring out upon us? Should we all be glad he lives in
> a country where it is dark much of the year -- or should we be
> really worried.
*Robin's* hubris?
Is this a typo, or do you really mean Robin Hanson?
I can understand why people accuse me of hubris, but Robin? Robin is
obviously restraining, discounting, and understating his estimation of his
own abilities, to the point where it's clear that he does in fact possess
more intelligence than he is willing to publicly attribute to himself.
And he's done that so carefully that I can't even tell what his real
estimation of his own intelligence is. (As for his real intelligence, of
course, I can't tell that either - not by looking at the portion of his
ideas that he's selected as being possible to explain.) In short, Robin
is playing exactly by the social modesty rules. Is the "hubris" part that
he is visibly doing just that, playing, or does he actually somehow manage
to sound hubristic? If Robin manages to come across as arrogant, I'll
probably just give up on the whole issue.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Jul 22 2003 - 07:12:18 MDT