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Comment by textlapse | Hacker News Reader

The ACM award is for their professional academic achievements - this fetishism to dig into another person’s personal life and find the most weird thing they said as the thing that paints over all of their life’s achievements as evil must stop.

It’s silly and dangerous. Because you don’t like thing A and they said/did thing A all of their lofty accomplishments get nullified by anyone. And worst of all internet gives your opinion the same weight as someone else (or the rest of us) who knows a lot about thing B that could change the world. From a strictly professional capacity.

This works me up because this is what’s dividing up people right now at a much larger scale.

I wish you well.

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>this fetishism to dig into another person’s personal life and find the most weird thing they said as the thing that paints over all of their life’s achievements as evil must stop.

This has nothing to do with his professional life. He has made these comments in a professional capacity at an industry AI conference... The rest of your comment is a total non sequitur.

>And worst of all internet gives your opinion the same weight as someone else (or the rest of us) who knows a lot about thing B that could change the world. From a strictly professional capacity.

I've worked professionally in the ML field for 7 years so don't try some appeal to authority bs on me. Geoff Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei and countless other leaders in the field all recognize and highlight the possible dangers of this technology.

> This has nothing to do with his professional life.

you mean his personal life?

oops, yes.

It just feels like a smear on his character: Imagine working on RL incrementally without any lofty goals or preconceived evil.

I do agree that there is some level of inherent safety issues with such technologies - but look at atomic bomb vs fission reactors etc: history paves a way through positivity.

Just because someone had an idea that eventually turned to have some evil branch off way further from the root idea doesn't mean they started with the evil idea in the first place or worse, someone else won't.

People left careers in AI in the 1990s because they came to realize that the tech would probably eventually become dangerous. Many more (including the star student in my CS program in the 1980s) never started a career in AI for the same reason.

Sutton and everyone else who has advanced the field deserve condemnation IMO, not awards.

> all of their lofty accomplishments get nullified by anyone

I don't think it's a question of whether their achievements are nullified, but as you mention, how to weight the opinions of various people. Personally, I think both a Turing award for technical achievement and a view that humanity ought to be replaced are relevant in evaluating someone's opinions on AI policy, and we shouldn't forget the latter because of the former.

(Also, this isn't about Sutton's personal life - that's a pretty bad strawman.)

By "view that humanity," do you mean alignment with the effective altruism cult?

Repressive laws on open AI/models—giving elites total control in the name of safety?

And this alternative perspective from the cult should disqualify someone from a Turing Award despite their achievements?

No, a "view that humanity ought to be replaced" is Sutton's, not an EA view. I'm not quite sure how you read that otherwise, except that you seem very angry. I sure hope our alternatives are better than human extinction or total control by elites...

>the most weird thing they said

Reminds me of a quote from Jean Cocteau, of which I could not find the exact words, but which roughly says that if the public knew what thoughts geniuses can have, it would be more terrified than admiring.

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