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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

Einstein didn't look like a crank though. His papers are relatively short and are coherent, he either already had a PHD in physics or was associated with an advisor (I didn't find a good timeline; he was awarded the PHD in the same year he published his 4 big papers).

Cranks lack formal education and spew forth the gobbledygook in reams.

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By this measure, I would say Bostrom is not a crank. Yudkowsky is less clear. I'd say no, but I'd understand if Yudkowsky trips some folks' crank detectors.

Einstein's paper on the photoelectric effect is a bit less than 7000 words.

It is part of the foundation of quantum mechanics.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies is in the range of 100,000 words (348 pages * roughly 300 words per page).

I'm not familiar with it, but looking around it isn't even clear if it even lays out any sort of concrete theory.

I read Superintelligence and found it "watery" -- weak arguments mixed with sort of interesting ones, plus very wordy.

At the risk of misrepresenting the book, since I don't have it in front of me, here's what bothered me most: stating early that AI is basically an effort to approximate an optimal Bayesian agent, then much later showing that a Bayesian approach permits AI to scope-creep any human request into a mandate to run amok and convert the visible universe into computronium. That doesn't demonstrate that I should be scared of AI running amok. It demonstrates that the first assumption -- we should Bayes all the things! -- is a bad one.

If that's all I was supposed to learn from all the running-amok examples, who's the warning aimed at? AFAICT the leading academic and industry research in AI/ML isn't pursuing the open-ended-Bayesian approach in the first place, largely isn't pursuing "strong" AI at all. Non-experts are, for other reasons, also in no danger of accidentally making AI that takes over the world.

1. Plenty of academics write books. 2. Comparing a paper and a book for length is obviously unfair. Bostrom has also written papers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Bostrom#Journal_articles_... 3. "Concrete theory" is vague. Is it a stand-in for "I won't accept any argument by a philosopher, only physicists need apply"?

I'm not intentionally trying to snub philosophy. With concrete theory, the point I was reaching for is that when you look to measure impact you probably want to point back to a compact articulation of an idea.

The book comparison was probably a cheap shot (on the other side of it, Einstein didn't need popular interest/approval for his ideas to matter; I think that is a positive).

I think as much as anything the comparison is worthless because we can look backwards at Einstein.

Sure, that's fair. I think Bostrom is no Einstein. But I maintain that he's no crank, either. There's a lot of space in the world for people who are neither.

Bostrom has also published papers. Comparing a book and a scientific paper isn't very fair.

Please see my spirited defense from 13 hours ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13242592

I saw that, I still disliked the comment enough that I needed to write that. Also to claim that the book has no concrete theory in the same sentence as you stating you're not familiar with the book. Like, c'mon...

That isn't what I claimed.

Bostrom's book is wordy, boring, filled with weak parables, analogies, lacking concretization of a theory.

Like always, alarmist material sells better than realism.

lacking concretization of a theory.

Would you elaborate? It's got some pretty big names recommending it. And Bostrom himself is an Oxford University professor.

He was awarded the doctorate for one of the papers (the photovoltaic one, if memory serves), after extending it one sentence to meet the minimum length requirement.

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