A reply to Francois Chollet on intelligence explosion
This is a reply to Francois Chollet, the inventor of the Keras wrapper for the Tensorflow and Theano deep learning systems, on his essay “The impossibility of intelligence explosion.”
If you post an argument online, and the only opposition you get is braindead arguments and insults, does it confirm you were right? Or is it just self-selection of those who argue online?
Don’t be overly attached to your views; some of them are probably incorrect. An intellectual superpower is the ability to consider every new idea as if it might be true, rather than merely checking whether it confirms/contradicts your current views.
Chollet’s essay seemed mostly on-point and kept to the object-level arguments. I am led to hope that Chollet is perhaps somebody who believes in abiding by the rules of a debate process, a fan of what I’d consider Civilization; and if his entry into this conversation has been met only with braindead arguments and insults, he deserves a better reply. I’ve tried here to walk through some of what I’d consider the standard arguments in this debate as they bear on Chollet’s statements.
As a meta-level point, I hope everyone agrees that an invalid argument for a true conclusion is still a bad argument. To arrive at the correct belief state we want to sum all the valid support, and only the valid support. To tally up that support, we need to have a notion of judging arguments on their own terms, based on their local structure and validity, and not excusing fallacies if they support a side we agree with for other reasons.
