From: Mark Waser (mwaser@cox.net)
Date: Wed Mar 12 2008 - 21:46:59 MDT
Great advice. I think that I have compelling but with a communications problem. I'll plug away for a little while and then bail if I don't see progress on the compelling front. :-)
----- Original Message -----
From: Rolf Nelson
To: sl4@sl4.org
Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2008 11:03 PM
Subject: Generic advice on friendliness proposals (was: Re: Friendliness SOLVED!)
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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