From: Ramez Naam (mez@apexnano.com)
Date: Wed Apr 30 2003 - 22:30:50 MDT
From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky [mailto:sentience@pobox.com]
> Academic fields are sometimes wastelands. Nature has no a
> priori tendency to produce truths that are easy to explain
> to a lay audience. "Credentials" are not the proper object
> of a university system, learning is. The "journals of an
> entire wing of academia" may easily be the wrong
> audience for any given piece of work. And it is not very
> hard to be more Bayesian than most people.
I agree with all of the above.
And yet, Barkley has an important point. Expressing this attitude is
not going to help you in funding SIAI or building FAI. The people who
control the purse strings of society care about letters after names.
They care about publications in peer-reviewed journals. And they care
about what "experts" in the apparently most related fields think of
you and your work, even if you do not.
Turn that intellect of yours towards the problem of raising money for
a project like yours. Given what you know of human behavior and the
patterns of research funding in the world today, what do you see as
the path most likely to get you the resources you need?
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