Mike Tintner wrote:
Richard,

I can't swear that I did read it. I read a paper of more or less exactly that length some time ago and do remember the Neats vs Scruffies bit.

Here's why I would have not made an effort to remember the rest - and this is consistent with what what you do mention briefly here from time to time, and the impression I've already formed:

"The new methodology that I propose is not about random exploration of different designs for a general, human-level AI, it is about collecting data on the global behavior of large numbers of systems, while at the same time remaining as agnostic as possible about the local mechanisms that might give rise to the global characteristics we desire."

This is a proposal about how you're going to try and come up with an idea. In spirit, (and I stress "spirit"), it's not a lot different from someone saying: "What's my idea? I'll tell you - I'm going to get the best brains [or computers] that money can buy - loads & loads of them. And get them to come up with an idea. Pretty original, huh?"

That's not an idea, Richard. *You* have to come up with that..


Is there any reason why you went to Section 4 of the paper, picked the first sentence out, and then criticized it as if that WAS the proposal I made?

Section 4 is 1700 words long.  Did you not notice the rest?

Sadly, Section 4 had to be only 1700 words long because the paper was already over budget by about 2000 words. It made me miserable to try to condense any ideas at all into that space, but I had no choice.

If you had come to me and said: "I read section 4 and I tried to understand what you said there, but it seems like it barely scratches the surface: could you not elaborate on [this or that point]?" I would have been more than willing to oblige. Heck, I'd have agreed with you: by the standards I anted to achieve, that section was awful. Instead you poured vicious, scornful sarcasm onto that first sentence. Doesn't look too good to me.

I feel really bad about being unable to put more detail into that paper, so you have touched my weak spot, for sure. But, as I say, I really had no choice. There is a huge amount more that could have been said, believe me. What I actually did was to explain the approach in terms of existing approaches, thereby giving myself some hope of reaching people who already understood what those existing approaches were. Connectionism, for example, was a good reference point.

Meet me halfway here and I am always willing to expand on anything I have written.



Richard Loosemore

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