← Back to context

Comment by swiftcoder

10 hours ago

> scientists who have spent their lives studying this

Please point me to one actual accredited scientist who has spent a lifetime studying AI alignment? Pretty much this whole field is only 5 years old

The field is much older, MIRI is ~20 years old. Look up Eliezer Yudkowsky.

  • Eliezer Yudkowsky is not a scientist. He made a popular Harry Potter fanfiction series and a "rationality" blog-community that attracts "human biological diversity" enthusiasts.

  • The field was purely theoretical 20 years ago, and Yudkowsky is pretty much the dictionary definition of "not accredited"

    • some use "not accredited" as a pejorative term.

      Lets not forget that the 'Fermat's Last Theorem' which has been pretty visible for the non-math crowd of late due to the recent AI frenzy about a purported proof was but one small contribution to the world's math lexicon by someone with a bachelors degree in civil law, that George Green was a baker and millwright, Boole was the son of a poor shoemaker in England with no formal university education and left school at age 14. Oliver Heaviside was a telegraph operator, and Michael Faraday was an apprentice bookbinder. So, not accredited shouldn't really carry much weight when it comes to mathematics. Lets not pretend that machine learning and the narrow branch that is the current approach to LLM inductions is anything but applied math.

      We might exercise our own minds and actually read the works and writings of a person, and use that as a measure of knowledge and perspective. Not all PhD dissertations are equal, and many have comprehension and ability to move us forward even without the institutional rigour.

      For those who prefer to have easy access to citations, here are some relevant papers that are not "Harry Potter" related, some with coauthors from Oxford University.

      Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks [https://intelligence.org/files/CognitiveBiases.pdf]

      Levels of Organization in General Intelligence [https://intelligence.org/files/LOGI.pdf]

      Corrigibility [https://intelligence.org/files/Corrigibility.pdf]

      The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence [https://intelligence.org/files/EthicsofAI.pdf]

      1 reply →

  • Yes, he's the exact reason people are distrustful. He's a crank who learned about reward hacking and made a new religious movement out of it, pretending it's a world-ending issue and deliberately avoiding much more serious issues like the concentration of power. Typical cult leader and manipulator, and his disciples in charge of major AI shops aren't any better.