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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I find that a lot of people think that academia just rushes in and immediately analyzes any interesting new idea, but of course that's not how it works at all. I.e., people ask me, "What do mainstream AI scientists think of your ideas?" and I have to explain that if I wanted to actually get commentary, I'd have to spend the next several years pushing my ideas in journals and even then it probably wouldn't work.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Great parable. Eliezer could learn a lot about fiction writing from you. I read the parable as an extended answer to Michael Vassar's gripe some weeks back that you ignore his posts/ideas and the posts/ideas of other non-academics on some of these topics. There's no easy answer, but as a third party in a world with both experts and amateurs, I think my rational goal is that experts should engage the brief writings of amateurs to the extent that it will overall maximize the elimination existential thread dragons from Lumpaland. No more, no less. Any more engagement isn't just charity towards amateurs, it's also a reduction of my personal persistence odds. Any less engagement, also a reduction. That's where things begin and end from my perspective.

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