From: Michael Wilson (mwdestinystar@yahoo.co.uk)
Date: Fri Dec 09 2005 - 07:26:32 MST
Apologies again to those for whom this is pointing out
the obvious;
Marc Geddes wrote:
> David all I've seen from you on the list is whining.
> What have you contributed to AGI theory? If you think
> my own ideas are all a load of rubbish you should try
> developing your own AI theory instead of whining at
> other people.
Criticising is much, much easier than inventing; it
takes far less time and knowledge to find a flaw in an
existing proposal than invent a new one. When I was
first learning AI I was constantly finding new things
that seemed to work, but then as I improved and continued
to research AGI these instances where rapidly outnumbered
by finding out why things didn't work. Currently I manage
to find something fatally wrong with >90% of the design
ideas that I try within a few minutes to a few days,
despite having what I'd consider fairly good intuition
about what to investigate, without even having an
external review. Frankly the days when I could just make
up something plausible and interesting sounding and
proceed to implementation, as the vast majority of
researchers do, were much more fun. But as I've often
said before, it may be fun but it won't get you anywhere.
Accurate criticism is vastly more useful than half-baked
blue sky theorising. Most people do not have the time and
the expertise to invent useful AGI/FAI theory, and in
these cases finding concrete failings in existing work is
a better allocation of effort than armchair speculation.
* Michael Wilson
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