Richard: I was one of the first people to help you get on the AGI list years ago and I have appreciated many of your emails but Ben's comments below are right on the money.
Although I don't agree with many of the technical points made by Ed Porter, he is obviously very intelligent (as are you) and has much interesting information and enthusiasm to bring to the table concerning AGI. I look forward to his emails even more than most of the other posters on this list. I for one, very much appreciate the effort made by Ben in writing this email and I would appreciate more information on AGI and less chest thumping and ego in the emails. Calling other people's ideas stupid, ridiculous etc IS the same as calling other people the same and it hurts just as much. Why can't someone disagree with other people's ideas without calling them names? Richard, you do this all the time and you often talk down to others. Mark Wiser is probably the biggest culprit on this list in calling people and ideas names but he too has made many interesting posts. Civility doesn't equal stupidity! Where's the harm in assuming that others on this list are also intelligent? David Clark From: Ben Goertzel [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: August-02-08 8:30 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [agi] EVIDENCE RICHARD DOES NOT UNDERSTAND COMPLEX SYSTEM ISSUES THAT WELL Richard, FYI, I find that I agree in essence with nearly all of Ed Porter's assertions on scientific and technical issues, although I sometimes think he overstates things or words things in an inexact way. Also, I note that over the last couple years I have received a number (maybe 5-10) of emails from various individuals suggesting that you be banned from this email list for general unproductive "trolling" behavior. I have never received any comparable emails regarding Ed Porter. Anyway I don't personally have much patience for these overheated email battles, though I accept that they're part of the culture of email lists. I think your views are largely plausible and respectable, though I find you also tend to overstate things, and you sometimes implicitly redefine common terms in uncommon ways which I find frustrating. However, I find it irritating that you diss other people (like me!) so severely for guiding their research based on their own scientific intuition, yet display such a dramatic level of confidence (IMO overconfidence) in your own scientific intuition. AGI is a frontier area where as yet little is solidly known, so knowledgeable and intelligent experts can be expected to have different intuitions. You seem distressingly unwilling to "agree to disagree", instead recurrently expressing negative emotion toward those whose not-fully-substantiated intuitions differ too much from your own not-fully-substantiated intuitions. It's boring, even more than it's frustrating. And I'm feeling like a butthead for wasting my time writing this email ;-p ben ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=108809214-a0d121 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
