

Shut up and do the impossible - MikeCapone
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/10/shut-up-and-do.html

======
jd
When people believe that a solution to a problem exists, they are much more
likely to find a solution. Take for instance
<http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/unsolvable.asp>

Hypothetically: what if Eliezer never ran the experiments? What if he just
wrote the report to convince a bunch of people that a solution does indeed
exist, to make it more likely somebody will find a solution and email it to
Eliezer (to check if it's the "same one")?

It fits the facts. And this meta-experiment is more interesting than the
experiment itself. After all, given enough time the AI will eventually run
into somebody who _will_ let it out (AIs live a long time), therefore it might
as well be you, especially considering the AI will reward you for releasing
it. Alternatively: the fact that the AI exists proves that people are capable
of creating superhuman intelligence, so eventually a "bad" person will create
such an AI and release it. In essence, the existence of the AI dooms mankind.
"I think, therefore I am", is all the AI needs to persuade the captor to let
it out.

So the meta-experiment is the interesting one. See what other people come up
with.

------
Eliezer
In all seriousness, I don't think every single Overcoming Bias post needs to
be linked here. There's quite a lot of them, and you can afford to cherry-pick
the best. Maybe just keep it to those items of advice that YCombinatorians
will have likely cause to call upon? Building a startup _should not be this
hard_.

~~~
motoko
Eliezer, Overcoming Bias posts are _unusually_ good. Yes, I think many of them
do belong here at Hacker News.

------
timcederman
I want to know what he said in the AI box experiment to be let out.

~~~
hugh
Shrug. He sweet-talked some guy on the internet into stupidly parting with ten
bucks. Big fricking woop. Used car salesmen perform far more impressive (and
lucrative) tricks of manipulation every day. I'm not sure why he's still
straining his arm to pat himself on the back over it, especially as he
eventually started losing and then gave up.

Sorry Eliezer, but the self-congratulatory tone of these posts is pretty
grating. You've never done anything impossible, and if winning at a "let's
pretend I'm an AI" role-playing game is the most impossible thing you've ever
done then you've never done anything hard either.

~~~
blakeweb
The point of the post wasn't the AI box game. I agree that, at least to me,
convincing someone to let you out of the box doesn't really sound impossible.
In the post he says he chose it as the example of something "impossible"
specifically because it's about the easiest thing he could think of to achieve
and then discuss that to many people seems impossible. He's just aiming in the
post to give people a real sense of what it means to try to solve an
impossible problem, and try with the actual goal of succeeding.

I also think formulating a provably friendly AI probably actually is an
extremely hard problem. I'm glad he's undertaking the challenge.

