I agree with Matt's analysis, regarding the AGI list For a while we had a greater number of experienced, "professional" AGI researchers on here (not trying to discount the value of newbies, just making an observation). But they mostly, got driven away via the trolling, for example by
-- Mike Tintner posting his technically-illiterate anti-AGI rants whenever he sees keywords that grab his attention, even if he doesn't have the background to understand the points being made -- Matt Mahoney responding to such a wide variety of posts with the same repetitive content regarding his own approach to AGI, his estimate of the cost of AGI -- a spate of posts a while back about how someone had received the secret to solving P=NP via divine inspiration -- a spate posts about how AGI would be rapidly solved if people would just heed a certain someone's advice about modifying their body temperature etc. etc. etc. These sort of things make the email list seem non-serious, and make many AGI researchers not want to waste time sifting through all the useless posts to find the few interesting ones. For these same reasons I nearly shut the list down a few years back, but then John Rose generally offered to take over management of it. I'm glad the list still exists, though, because for all its copious flaws, it does provide a decent venue for newbies to connect with other folks interested in AGI. For the same reasons, I don't read the list regularly these last years, but just read a few posts now and then quasi-randomly... I suppose that in a few years, as AGI becomes more mainstream, the list will either start to get moderated and cleaned-up and become more meaningful, or will become obsolete and finally get killed. I think it could become a good list if it were moderated both for relevancy and for repetitiveness. I also think that, as has repeatedly been noted on the list, a suitably elegant combination email/forum approach would be better than a pure email list (and would deal with the repetitiveness issue). I think that AGi is becoming more, rather than less, popular -- and the waning of this list does not indicate broader trends. I also note that, in the last few years, venues like Twitter and Facebook have continued to rise, rendering email lists increasingly dinosauric, which may explain part of the dwindling (though not all!) .. The Singularity list never had the traction of the AGI list, as the theme is broader and there are more venues for discussing Singularity-related issues... -- Ben G On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 4:18 PM, Matt Mahoney <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 2:45 PM, Steve Richfield > <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> The [agi] forum activity gradually peaked in 2008, and the [singularity] >> forum activity gradually peaked in 2009. Since then, we are now down to >> around half the historical peaks in posting activity. >> >> Has the shine now worn off of these areas? Do the newbies now go >> elsewhere? > > No, most of the people who were doing active research (as opposed to > just talking about it) have gone elsewhere so they can get some work > done. > >> Are the postings now more "on target" so fewer of them are >> needed? > > No, there seems to be less insightful posts and more trolling. (I > guess you can count my post in the latter category). > ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-c97d2393 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-2484a968 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
