From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Thu May 27 2004 - 05:48:05 MDT
> I'm
> confident that my intution will crush Eliezer and Ben, just
> like it did all of the other aca-dummmies that came up against me.
Dude, why do you think you're the only one with an intuition?
I'm sure you're a clever, knowledgeable and highly intuitive bloke, but
there are plenty of us around.
Remember the Eric Clapton album "There's One in Every Town"? The
original title was "The Greatest Guitarist in the World -- There's One
in Every Town", but the record company made him change it because they
thought the average listener would be too dumb to understand the irony
of the title.
The history of the human race shows that nobody's intuition has ever
been quite as good as you think yours is. As a case in point, Einstein
had a hell of a great intuition, but his intuition about quantum theory
was wrong (he thought the EPR experiment was a disproof of quantum
physics, for example; and he spent years waddling down a dead-end path
to unified physics.)
It's hard to escape the conclusion that you're suffering from "delusions
of grandeur." Not that this implies you're not grand -- perhaps you
are, and perhaps you'll accomplish great things, even world-changing
things, who knows -- but your hyperconfidence in your own intuition does
not seem to be rational.
-- Ben G
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