Dr. Matthias Heger wrote:
Richard Loosemore [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote
That was a personal insult.
You should be ashamed of yourself, if you cannot discuss the issues
without filling your comments with ad hominem abuse.
I did think about replying to the specific insults you set out above,
but in the end I have decided that it is not worth the effort to deal
with people who stoop to that level.
If you look back on everything I have written, you will notice that I
NEVER resort to personal attacks in order to win an argument. I have
defended myself against personal attacks from others, and I have
sometimes become angry at those attacks, but that is all.
Richard Loosemore
If you attack the work of a person or his opinion again and again then this
is informally a personal attack. And often the issue of such discussion
moves away from a certain subject to the pure question who is right.
Valid point . except that I have not attacked the work of a person
or his opinion again and again.
I have attacked topics, issues and ideas. I have attacked (yesterday) a
set of papers for being generally low quality. That is what science is
all about. I did not call anyone a fool.
AGI is a very complex subject. And we should always remember that we have a
common goal: The creation of human level intelligence or even super human
intelligence. This goal is perhaps the most difficult goal I know. We may
have different opinions how far we are and how things are to be evaluated
that we already have.
But we should better talk about how we can move a little bit nearer towards
our common goal.
My approach would be, that we make thought experiments like my example of
the robot in the garden who is asked how many apples are in the tree.
We should outline the processes which could happen in the robot's brain.
First, the necessary processes should be named without presenting detailed
algorithms.
Then we should ask which processes seem to be easy and which are hard. The
hard tasks need of course most attention.
We must first ask why they are hard. What constitutes the real problem.
Probably we will reach points where we see, that the set of processes we
initially assumed, must be changed.
Incrementally, we will derive a more and more detailed plan how everything
could work.
Understood and agreed. That is exactly how I approach the subject myself.
One reason I have not contributed to your recent discussion with others,
though, is that many of your comments represent channels down which
others have already beaten a long path. I do not want to criticise you
because I have great sympathy with many of your overall objectives, but
I would be able to comment much better if you were to set your ideas in
the context of all the work that already exists in the field of
cognitive psychology and cognitive science.
On a more general note, the problem I face right now is a frustration
with people who want to build bandwagons around empty idea, or old
ideas. I have *seen* this process happen many times already, and I am
tired of the politics of it.
My patience finally snapped yesterday. I regret that it did: I should
have kept my thoughts to myself. But that does not change the fact that
my vicious and acidic criticism was actually valid: this field is in
danger of becoming just another fundraising vehicle built around an
emperor who wears no clothes (or, even worse, is wearing the same
clothes that other people wore 20 years ago, but is passing them off as
being new).
You will notice that I have consistently tried to get discussions
started on topics of deep concern: the complex systems problem,
grounding, the nature of rationality, representational issues, the role
of motivational systems in the control of an AGI. I have found,
consistently, that those people who do understand that these are real
issues do not want to discuss them, and that when they start to see
these issues aas rocking their own personal platform, they lash out.
What Ben just did was utterly inexcusable. He tried to silence a critic
by accusing him of being irrational in other words, not of sound
mind, not able to do science. Instead of addressing the issues raised
by this critic, he tried to imply that there was something wrong with
the mind of that critic.
That kind of behavior is the most repugnant thing that one scientist can
do to another.
Richard Loosemore
---
agi
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