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Julia Galef
@juliagalef
, 6 tweets, 3 min read Read on Twitter
1) I'm frustrated Steven Pinker won't admit an error in Enlightenment Now. Summary:
- Pinker names Stuart Russell as an expert who's skeptical of AI risk
- Someone points out that's exactly backwards; Russell is one of the main experts warning about AI risk
- Pinker doubles down
2) Here's the critic, Phil Torres, pointing out Pinker's error:
salon.com/2019/01/26/ste…
3) Here's Pinker's response to Torres. He cites a post Russell wrote which says there are "reasons for optimism" about AI risk.
whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2019/01/29/a-r…
4) But Russell says in that post that AI could wipe out humanity & we need ppl working on AI safety. His reasons for optimism at the end don't negate what he believes is a serious risk. I don't see how you could read this & call him a skeptic of AI risk.
edge.org/response-detai…
5) And you can easily find other articles and interviews with Russell where he talks about AI as an existential threat, e.g.:
technologyreview.com/s/602776/yes-w…
6) To be clear: I ~agree with the thesis of Enlightenment Now. I like Pinker's work in general. There are lots of dumb critiques of Pinker. I'm not taking a position on the AI risk issue here.

My point is it's bad that Pinker got this fact wrong and won't admit it.

/end
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More from @juliagalef see all

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Julia Galef
@juliagalef
For a long time I thought ppl were saying dumb things about rationality, until I realized they were using a different definition of rationality from me. I think their definition is something like "If social consensus is that an idea is unpromising, then that idea is irrational"
That definition of rationality leads to people saying things like... "Steve Jobs had the irrational belief that people could finish a project really fast if they tried. They didn't believe him, but he kept turning out to be right. That proves that irrationality can be beneficial"
The definition I'd been using is the decision science one -- forming beliefs about the world as accurately as you can, given your priors & the information available to you (epistemic rationality), and making decisions that maximize your expected utility (instrumental rationality)
Read 8 tweets
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Julia Galef
@juliagalef
The more I follow academic debates, the more I think over-politeness harms our ability to converge on the truth. A lot of papers are weak enough they constitute ~zero evidence for their claim. But critics just politely refer to "questions" or "debate" around the papers... 1/n
... rather than "Uh, guys, we should not be updating on those papers, like at all"

So we keep citing them, and treating them as evidence, bc we're socially obligated to. And in practice we end up using "# of papers claiming X" as a proxy for "strength of evidence for X" (2/n)
CLARIFICATIONS:
- I'm complaining about over-politeness to *ideas*, not to people
- Criticizing papers does cause some adjustment of belief away from their claims. But not as much as it would if the critics were allowed to say "c'mon, this paper is zero evidence for X" (3/n)
Read 5 tweets
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Julia Galef
@juliagalef
You're at a Safeway and you spot a guy stealing food (putting packages of nuts & dried fruit in his backpack). Do you tell a manager or not?
If you're wondering what happened... I did tell a nearby Safeway employee. Then I had second thoughts & felt bad, so I went looking for the thief to offer to pay for the food instead. Didn't find him, then ran into the Safeway employee again, who said (1/2)
the thief had run off with the food before they could do anything. Which I guess I was glad about. Not sure what my policy should be in general, but stealing food from a big company does seem less bad than most. (2/2)
PS The thief was like 6'10" and I didn't want to confront him
Read 3 tweets

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