Wiki Interview With Eliezer

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And Now... For Something Completely Different

An Interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky

Questions by Anand

Topics

For a list of questions answered in this FAQ, see Wiki Interview With Eliezer/QuestionList.

Feel free to include your own questions in Eliezer Interview Question Suggestions.

A note on the future of this interview

Is this meant to morph into an "interview with SL4"? There are a lot of important issues covered in the interview; in principle, by editing the interview we could be staging a nonlinear debate about them; and when a steady state (consensus) was reached, the sections of the interview could be elevated back to the top directory level, becoming General Topics or Technical Topics. Or do we want to keep it personal? -- Mitchell Porter

Your idea sounds great to me, Mitch. Would it be possible for you to write a more detailed account of what you have in mind, which could then be placed at Wiki Interview With Eliezer? (done -- Mitchell Porter) Incidentally, the original intention was to edit the interview and possibly publish a shorter version offline and a longer version online. For many unfortunate reasons, all of them my fault, this hasn't happened, not yet anyway. -- Anand

Look above, and you will see a list of important topics. People need to be able to find their way to these subpages without thinking to look under "Interview With Eliezer". One way to solve this problem is via efficient indexing: make sure that pages like General Topics link to the interview subpages. Another possibility would be to elevate the subpages to the top level. E.g. /Cognitive Science would become the Cognitive Science page for this Wiki. It would bring a lot of content with it. That would mean, however, that it would become the general battleground for debate and discussion on that subject; it would no longer be showcasing Eliezer's opinions specifically. One way around this dilemma - or a halfway house, at any rate - would be to have a "WikiInterviewWithSL4". These pages could then concentrate on depicting Eliezer's views accurately and well; the SL4 interview page can be where we all have a go; and anything there that looks worthy of being elevated into 'official', impersonal content, can be transplanted to the top level. -- Mitchell Porter (at Anand's suggestion; see my original comment under Eliezer Interview Question Suggestions)

This sounds good to me. To recap, with additions, to verify I'm following your suggestions correctly:

  1. Create a new page, WikiInterviewWithSL4.
  2. Reproduce the interview topics at WikiInterviewWithSL4. Link the WikiInterviewWithSL4 topics to the appropriate directory page, whether General Topics, Technical Topics et al. From there, content for a particular interview topic will diverge from Eliezer's specific answers, and ideally converge to a consensus SL4 opinion for particular content within a particular topic. From there, well-developed content may be used for "consensus" SL4 Wiki content. From there, the content could be further developed, if necessary, and used in, e.g., an SL4 FAQ.
  3. Maintain the Wiki Interview With Eliezer page and its topic pages. These will be specifically used to edit Eliezer's preexisting answers, and as a location for future questions and answers with Eliezer.

Even though the above is missing a lot of detail, am I essentially following you? Best, -- Anand

Yes you are, although I'd like to see some input from other people before charging ahead with this. My immediate worry is that handled incorrectly, this would just generate pointless and even harmful redundancy, with up to three separate copies of something, and important comments possibly languishing unnoticed because they were attached to the 'wrong' page. But all in all, maybe it's an experiment worth doing. -- Mitchell Porter

Looks like a plan to me, this interview would provide excellent seed content for further discussion and elaboration of the issues. -- Michael Anissimov

I like it too. It's certainly worth trying. If we notice redundancies or structural inadequacies, we can always make (or suggest) corrections on the fly. -- Christian Rovner

In its current form, this interview is meant to be read as a whole. There are several parts that refer to other parts. This means that, for example, copying the contents of /Cognitive Science to the main Cognitive Science page may be a bad idea. Making a page called WikiInterviewWithSL4 based on this page is an interesting idea, but it probably wouldn't work well since most of the questions in this interview were specifically intended for Eliezer. Also, the Singularity Questions page seems to already serve the same purpose as the WikiInterviewWithSL4 page would serve. As for making the content of this interview more accessible to casual surfers of this Wiki (if any exist), this page is linked to from the "Best of sl4" section of the All Topics page, and the subpages are listed in the section for their respective topics in the All Topics page. Unfortunately, some of the subpages didn't fit in any of the topics currently listed in the All Topics page.

Also, since this interview was conducted in 2002, several of the answers in this interview no longer reflect Eliezer's current opinions. If anyone knows which answers are obsolete, it may be worth either marking them as obsolete or deleting them entirely. Actually, so much of this interview has become obsolete that it may be a better idea to copy the parts that are still relevant to other Wiki Pages that discuss the relevant topics. I have started to do this. I have marked which parts have been copied on the page they were copied from. This may make the pages slightly more ugly, but this seemed like the appropriate thing to do. --observer

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