Richard Loosemore said:
But instead of deep-foundation topics like these, what do we get? Mostly what we get is hacks. People just want to dive right and make quick assumptions about the answers to all of these issues, then they get hacking and build something - *anything* - to make it look as though they are getting somewhere.
I don't believe that this is accurate. Those who I speak to in this community (including the authors of papers at AGI-08 you claim have produced hacks) give me the clear impression that they spend every day considering deep-foundation issues. The systems that you see are not random hacks based on quick assumptions, but the by-products of people grappling with these deep-foundation issues.
This is certainly my experience. Every day I'm trying to grapple with deeper problems, but must admit that I'm unlikely to solve anything from my armchair. To create something that can be comprehended, critiqued and studied, I have to carefully reduce my ideas to a set of what may be almost laughable assumptions. However, once I've made such assumptions and implemented a system, I have a much better grasp on the problem at hand. From there, I can go back and explore ways of removing some of those assumptions, I can try to better model my ideas, and I can rethink the deeper issues with the knowledge I learnt from that experiment. When I publish work on those concrete systems, I admit that I am not directly discussing deeper issues. However, I believe that this method makes communication much more effective and clear (I've tried both ways and have experienced remarkably more success in conveying my ideas with sloppy examples than with excellent arguments) and I believe that most readers can look beyond the annoying but necessary assumptions and see the deeper ideas that I am attempting to express. As I work on the problem further, I'll create systems that are closer to my own ideas and may find ways of distilling my ideas into more formal treatments of the fundamental issues. I suspect that this experience is shared by most people here.
Ultimately, I think that any work in an area like AGI should be read with attention to the things left "between the lines". In fact, I think that expecting researchers to focus only on the fundamentals first is counterproductive: not only will you end up with a whole lot of hypothesizing with no connection to reality or experience, but you'll have a whole lot of talk and opinion but no understanding of each other.
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