Ben Goertzel wrote:
Richard,
FYI, I find that I agree in essence with nearly all of Ed Porter's
assertions on scientific and technical issues, although I sometimes
think he overstates things or words things in an inexact way.
I know of several talented and technically competent people on this list
who would find that statement astonishing. It damages your credibility
greatly that you say so.
Also, I note that over the last couple years I have received a number
(maybe 5-10) of emails from various individuals suggesting that you be
banned from this email list for general unproductive "trolling"
behavior. I have never received any comparable emails regarding Ed Porter.
I can quite believe it: there are some intolerant fools on this list
who would make just such a complaint purely because they disagree with
me. Unfortunately, they seem happy to go behind closed doors to
complain to you, but in public they make fools of themselves when they
try to set out the reasons why they think that I have been a "troll".
Anyway I don't personally have much patience for these overheated email
battles, though I accept that they're part of the culture of email lists.
I think your views are largely plausible and respectable, though I find
you also tend to overstate things, and you sometimes implicitly redefine
common terms in uncommon ways which I find frustrating. However, I find
it irritating that you diss other people (like me!) so severely for
guiding their research based on their own scientific intuition, yet
display such a dramatic level of confidence (IMO overconfidence) in your
own scientific intuition. AGI is a frontier area where as yet little is
solidly known, so knowledgeable and intelligent experts can be expected
to have different intuitions. You seem distressingly unwilling to
"agree to disagree", instead recurrently expressing negative emotion
toward those whose not-fully-substantiated intuitions differ too much
from your own not-fully-substantiated intuitions. It's boring, even
more than it's frustrating. And I'm feeling like a butthead for wasting
my time writing this email ;-p
And, as you have done on many other occasions, you present a distorted
picture of the situation, making surreptitious, backhanded accusations
without backing them up.
I *never* diss other people for guiding their research based on their
own scientific intuition. I repeat: this is an utterly false accusation.
What I have done on several occasions is to challenge ideas. But what
then happens (in your case) is that instead of addressing the challenge
itself, you present some gross distortions of my ideas, and then proceed
to vilify or mock that distorted version of what I said.
Following that, I try my best to bring the discussion back to the real
ideas that I actually proposed, but your only response is to assert that
this is all just a matter of different people having different
intuitions. You declare that I have not actually presented any ideas or
arguments, only intuitions.
And then, in the final part of the ritual, I write the ideas down a
third time, very, very carefully, just to make it clear that there are
real issues that need to be addressed. And in this final phase, you
just ignore it and claim that you do not have the time to waste on
discussion.
And now, you are saying that because I have the temerity to object to
this distortion, I am somehow at fault?
I would be perfectly happy if you simply finished our discussions with a
statement that your scientific intuition tells you that the problem is
not as serious as I think. You have sometimes done this, and I have
gracefully subsided.
But you do NOT end the discussion that way. You fling out a final
handful of insults as you leave: you condemn someone else's carefully
crafted argument as nothing more than "unsubstantiated intution", and
you add a few parting distortions of their argument, to boot.
It is THAT behavior that I feel compelled to object to, not the "let's
agree to disagree" behavior.
Richard Loosemore
-------------------------------------------
agi
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