Re: Education [was Re: The Conjunction Fallacy Fallacy [WAS Re: Anti-singularity spam.]]

From: Richard Loosemore (rpwl@lightlink.com)
Date: Mon Aug 28 2006 - 22:16:18 MDT


Rik,

It's Eliezer's list: you can hardly throw him into a kernelnewbies
corner of his own list.

Perhaps you missed something that I pointed out earlier: I was awarded
a postgraduate degree in cognitive science 19 years ago. As part of
that degree I had to pass exams and write essays on various subjects,
including work that covered the field that has been under dispute. I
wrote substantial AI programs and was awarded the first ever Distinction
given for that degree, and I read Tversky and Kahneman's "Judgment Under
Uncertainty" at a time when Eliezer was probably still in hoping to get
into kindergarten. I subsequently pursued cognitive science as a
career, and have publications in that field.

Correct me if I am wrong, but did Eliezer take a postgraduate degree in
cognitive science at any time? An undergraduate degree? Any kind of
qualification in that field?

Do you seriously suggest that I know less than Eliezer about cognitive
science?

Are you, perhaps, a qualified cognitive scientist yourself, that you
judged the recent discussion and came to your conclusion below? If you
are, I would welcome your thoughts about some of the issues involved.

You might want to take off that brown hat first, though.

Richard Loosemore

Rik van Riel wrote:
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
>> I did you the courtesy of informing you that you were ignorant,
>> because human knowledge is vast, and even competent people cannot
>> always be expected to know when they stumble into territory that has
>> already been thoroughly explored.
>
> While the above probably accurate, this attitude does not help
> stimulate AI research.
>
> I wonder if it would make sense to set up something along the
> lines of http://kernelnewbies.org/ for people interested in
> AGI, but not skilled at it yet.
>
> The idea is not to take away from Eliezer's precious time, but
> to learn and discover things together, hopefully creating some
> more Eliezers in the future :)
>
> I am willing to host the wiki for this project. The site
> should be a wiki because the initial participants will
> eventually "graduate" and spend their time developing AI,
> not maintaining an AI education site. From the kernelnewbies
> project it appears that most people are only at the "smart
> enough to teach, but inexperienced enough not to be a full-time
> developer" level for 6-12 months. This means it should be
> very easy for people to roll into and out of the job of site
> maintainer. Also, newbies often run into great articles that
> ought to be linked :)
>



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