> but if the rule you use is "if they look like a crank, ignore everything they say", then you miss special relativity (and later general relativity)
No you don't, you just don't catch it right away, relativity actually holds up under scrutiny. Besides, I reject the premise anyway.
Einstein did serious work on the photoelectric effect first and then gradually worked towards relativity. Outside of the pop history he had very little in common with cranks. This is basically the result you end up seeing when you look into any of these examples used to try and argue against the ability to pattern match cults and cranks, the so-called false negatives never (to my knowledge) actually match the profile. Only the fairy tale built around their success matches it.
So it is with cult-ish behaviour as well, these are specific human failures that self-reinforce and while some of their behaviour occurs in successful people (especially successful and mentally ill or far from neuro-typical people) there is a core of destructive and unique behaviour evident in both that you absolutely should recognize and avoid. Not just the statistical argument that you will gain much more than you lose by avoiding it, it's that it is staggeringly improbably that you will lose anything.
Yep, Einstein was an expert in his field who wrote a couple of ground-breaking papers in his field. As far as I can tell no-one who is an expert in AI (or even similar fields) is worried at all about super-intelligence.
Literally everybody who is an expert in AI is worried about how to manage super-intelligence. The standard introductory text in AI by Russell and Norvig spends almost four pages discussing the existential risk that super-intelligence poses. The risk is so obvious that it was documented by IJ Good at Bletchley Park with Turing, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were identified even before that.
You haven't thought much about the risk of superintelligence if you think it is a typical risk. Is that compared to poorly designed children's toys or nuclear weapons?
I would go as far as to say, "humanity" as it is defined today, is doomed, it is just a matter of time.
The only question is: Will doom play out with a dramatic disaster or as a peaceful handoff/conversion from biologically natural humans to self-designed intelligence.
Either way, natural human beings will not remain dominant in a world where self-interested agents grow smarter in technologic instead of geologic timescales.
No you don't, you just don't catch it right away, relativity actually holds up under scrutiny. Besides, I reject the premise anyway.
Einstein did serious work on the photoelectric effect first and then gradually worked towards relativity. Outside of the pop history he had very little in common with cranks. This is basically the result you end up seeing when you look into any of these examples used to try and argue against the ability to pattern match cults and cranks, the so-called false negatives never (to my knowledge) actually match the profile. Only the fairy tale built around their success matches it.
So it is with cult-ish behaviour as well, these are specific human failures that self-reinforce and while some of their behaviour occurs in successful people (especially successful and mentally ill or far from neuro-typical people) there is a core of destructive and unique behaviour evident in both that you absolutely should recognize and avoid. Not just the statistical argument that you will gain much more than you lose by avoiding it, it's that it is staggeringly improbably that you will lose anything.