Upvoted, but Iâm a bit worried about the format âN bad takes about Xâ because itâs not very good at reliably producing truth. See for example âFrequently Raised but Weak Arguments Against Intelligent Designâ which has some strawmanning but also many rhetorically valid steps and plausible arguments.
That natural selection can increase the complexity of organisms is a non-obvious fact! The orthogonality thesis, instrumental convergence, value fragility, and the fact that you canât raise AI like a child are also non-obvious! And twitter-length responses donât actually give you much evidence one way or the other for non-obvious propositions. (They only do for really bad takes like âJust legally mandate that AIs must be aligned.â)
So in addition to OPâs warning that we shouldnât treat this as authoritative/âexhaustive, I think we should do one or more of
try extra hard to be sure the responses are actually true
not confuse the fun conversation-starter activity here with debate or actual truth-seeking discussion
distinguish between twitter refutations of obviously bad takes, and counterintuitive ideas that take entire books to explain and (without the benefit of 100 years of scientific consensus) might be wrong
Upvoted, but Iâm a bit worried about the format âN bad takes about Xâ because itâs not very good at reliably producing truth. See for example âFrequently Raised but Weak Arguments Against Intelligent Designâ which has some strawmanning but also many rhetorically valid steps and plausible arguments.
That natural selection can increase the complexity of organisms is a non-obvious fact! The orthogonality thesis, instrumental convergence, value fragility, and the fact that you canât raise AI like a child are also non-obvious! And twitter-length responses donât actually give you much evidence one way or the other for non-obvious propositions. (They only do for really bad takes like âJust legally mandate that AIs must be aligned.â)
So in addition to OPâs warning that we shouldnât treat this as authoritative/âexhaustive, I think we should do one or more of
try extra hard to be sure the responses are actually true
not confuse the fun conversation-starter activity here with debate or actual truth-seeking discussion
distinguish between twitter refutations of obviously bad takes, and counterintuitive ideas that take entire books to explain and (without the benefit of 100 years of scientific consensus) might be wrong
Upvoted!