Career, Physics and Goals (was: Artificial General Intelligence Speculations)

Oh, I see. Well, I can say that I believe I’m expressing a considered, serious opinion that draws on my expertise at reasoning and on a lot of information. I’m not coming to a conclusion based on vague general principles or based on taking a worldview and then expecting everything to fit it. I’m not expressing a default opinion that I’d hold unless/until proven otherwise. I deny the bias rather than considering it obvious. I consider making that error ~incompatible with being a great philosopher (who ought to be able to deal with bias well, know what he does and doesn’t know, qualify claims appropriately, and only assert stuff he has rational confidence about).

Re string theory: DD is inconsistent about being rational so it could be one of his weaknesses. Your rebuttal to him seemed reasonable to me but I don’t know enough about the details. Another potential issue with string theory – which I have some loose impressions about but don’t really know and didn’t investigate – is possible connections with attitudes to math similar to yours.

If anything biases DD against many other physicists, my first guess would be its their rejection of MWI. Which I think he has good points about. And related to the MWI issue is instrumentalism, positivism, disrespect for conceptual explanations, “shut up and calculate”, etc.

I’m actually curious if DD is/was as good of a physicist as his opinion or public reputation says. When I find a lot of errors with someone, I get suspicious of their other stuff, and all those misquote errors DD made in his books show poor attention to detail (and/or some alternatives like dishonesty), which is relevant to doing physics well. But I’m not in a position to check all of it, plus I have other stuff to do. I know of some errors in some stuff he wrote in physics papers but not in the core physics itself which I don’t have the math/physics background to check without a ton of work. There was some problematic stuff he wrote about Popper in one paper (search for “The logic of experimental tests, particularly of Everettian quantum theory” here) and his Turing misquote in another paper (btw I contacted the publisher, who doesn’t care about the error and won’t even publish some errata/correction/retraction on a website or do anything at all, which says something bad about academic journals).

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