Comment by naishoya
2 hours ago
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]
> some use "not accredited" as a pejorative term.
I am absolutely using "not accredited" in a pejorative sense here. That he publishes papers coauthored by a couple of philosophy professors at Oxford (all of whom have made a ton of money from the Silicon Valley AI Alignment and Effective Altruism crowds) does not make him a scientist.
I will also note that the Oxford Philosophy department finally shitcanned the whole Future of Humanity Institute a couple of years back.