From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Mar 18 2000 - 21:24:52 MST
Looking over my previous post, I see that it contains a much
higher-than-usual incidence of the term "stupid". I would like to point
out that the referent of this term is always a specific chain of
reasoning in the mind of a postulated Power, not den Otter, and I
apologize to both den Otter and the list if they have gained any other impression.
I was using "stupid" in a technical sense of "reasoning which is not
plausible at the postulated level of intelligence". For example, using
a subgoal which interferes with a supergoal is a mistake avoidable even
by simple modern-day crystalline AI planning methods, and not a
plausible chain of reasoning in a rich transhuman intelligence. It was
a mistake to phrase this as "chain of reasoning X is stupid". The
statement is succinct, and justifiably uses the emotional weight of
'stupidity' - i.e., "This is *stupid* and a Power wouldn't do that" - to
convey an intended connotation, but the chance of misinterpretation is
too high, especially if the term is used more than once.
I need a better term than "stupid". Saturating the message with it made
the message sound a lot more aggressive than it was intended to be.
Maybe "nonthinkable" would have the correct connotations?
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/beyond.html
Member, Extropy Institute
Senior Associate, Foresight Institute
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