Clearly it depends on the context, and how the questions get asked. Too often I see this kind of thing play out as “Oh let’s find a chick to give us the woman’s seal of approval”. I was trying to be clear about when such a request would and would not play that way. The equivalent to what was discussed in the OP (a call for the participation of artists) would be sending out a general office email asking for (random) women to comment on the ad campaign. That’s condescending and classic privileged behavior. Just asking some particular women they respect the very same kind of questions that they might put to a male colleague, isn’t.

Delineation #1:
Mathematical truths are discovered Artistic truths are mediated.
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Delineation#2:
Mathematicians generally agree on what is mathematically correct. Artists generally have no idea what is artistically correct.
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Delineation#3
Math illuminates the supportive skeletal structure of thought whereas Art illuminates the metaphoric wind, which blows through that structure.
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Delineation#4
Science reveals the body of GGod and Art reveals GGod’s mind — or is it the converse?
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Delineation#5
Pure Mathematics has no expression for metaphor however; it does provide us a structure that can be used for it.
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Delineation#6
In general, the mathematician is not interested in finding truths through nonsense as opposed to the artist who is.

If the former, then (1) I think you’re focusing on specifics of the particular case, which seems kinda off-topic (I thought the point here was about how much sense it makes to solicit contributions from groups like “artists”, “women”, “people with PhDs”, etc., without having a specific plan for what sort of contributions you want from them), and (2) I don’t think it’s possible to make further progress with that discussion without having the actual figures, which I don’t.

If the latter, then you’re probably right, but the point at which it stops being worth funding something depends a lot on the specifics and I’m not sure what the relevance is here. I mean, did anyone claim that everyone ought to be donating exclusively to SIAI or anything like that?

(Perhaps the subtext is that you think SIAI isn’t a good thing to be contributing to at all. I’m taking no position on that, not least because I haven’t thought through the difficult issues involved; I thought the interesting discussion here was about the general issue, not the Singularity-related specifics.)

By whom?

I considered not using that example but decided to anyway. Whether it *would* be considered condescending depends on the audience. You feel that way for instance, but I know women who would not consider it so.

How the meeting got started is not particularly relevant (IMHO). Suppose three males were assigned the task, for instance. In any case, I’m willing to go on record by suggesting that there are real differences in the way that women and men approach certain topics, based in part on physiology, and in part on different cultural experiences (see “Black like Me”).

The primary point being that the inviters were not looking for “a female perspective” but “a perspective from a female—who may in all expectation see things differently than we do”.

The utility of funding a specific project goes to zero as the amount of money that project requires per unit of output goes to infinity. Funding one project has an opportunity cost, in the utility equation, of not funding other projects. So at some point, it will make sense (doing the opposite would have a negative expected utility) to contribute to some other project than SIAI. I don’t have a clear idea of where that point is, but we’ve gotten a lot closer in the past two years.

Terminator and Matrix, for example, recently raised Singularity awareness, not in the best way. An good artist who wants to help and has a strong understanding of the issues can raise awareness in a more enlighted way.

Way back when, written science fiction was some kind of vision of the future. A limited one, but at least an attempt to say what we wanted, or what technology would do to us. Now, there’s almost nothing. Go into the SF section of a bookstore and it’s alt-history, various type of war stories, thrillers and lots of fantasy novels.

The only two “near-term” SF things I’ve read recently are Accellerando by Charles Stross, and Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. We need a lot more of that. I’d even like to see someone make a decent SF movie based on this kind of material. It’s hopeless to get that through a studio, but perhaps you could open-source produce it and distribute it over the net. Seems like it’s time for that kind of thing to start happening.

So I’d welcome all the artists! Please come and dream for us.

Not “might” but *would* be considered condescending. It’s classic privileged behavior to essentially ask the token X to speak for Xs. And Eliezer hits on exactly *why* it’s privileged and condescending. Because if they really cared about her opinion, they would *already have specific questions to ask*, rather than merely “solicit her perspective” so they can check “woman” (or in the original case “artist”) off on their checklist of countries heard from.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.12/rembrandt.html?pg=1&topic=rembrandt&topic_set=

It seems to me that the original invitation was for artists to participate in the discussion. To me this isn’t absurd at all. No one was asking them (as far as I can tell) to “say something artistic.” Rather, there was a recognition that those who self-identify as artists may have a different perspective, whether that perspective itself can be considered “artistic” in its own right or not.

It’s not unlike a group of male advertisers sitting around a table considering whether they should solicit a female colleague’s perspective on a particular ad campaign. That might be considered condescending, but its equally likely that her opinion may be of value, if not uniquely “feminine” in some way.

Nonetheless, as you suggest, a vague invitation to “participate” won’t necessarily generate anything useful.