Generic advice on friendliness proposals (was: Re: Friendliness SOLVED!)

From: Rolf Nelson (rolf.h.d.nelson@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Mar 12 2008 - 21:03:24 MDT


Here's some generic unsolicited advice for friendliness proposals.

1. It's not sufficient to have the correct solution, it has to be *compelling
*to other people or it will never get implemented. If what you're saying is
correct and useful, but people don't understand that what you're saying is
correct and useful, it means you've "bit off more than you can chew" and
should back up and flesh out a solution to a well-defined subproblem, and/or
concentrate on more falsifiable or rigorous statements that you can
objectively defend.

2. Prioritize what you're working on. Consider reviewing <
http://www.intelligence.org/research/researchareas> for some important
subproblems that need to be solved.

3. As with any hard technical subject that hasn't been solved yet, you're
extremely unlikely to be able to solve it in a compelling way unless you've
examined many, many other failed approaches first, and understood why they
failed.

4. Feel free to keep plugging away, but keep in mind there are other ways of
helping out with FAI besides the thankless job of posing unappreciated
solutions to we ignorant critics.

-Rolf



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