[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> You elided the "necessarily".

Well, if it follows, then it follows necessarily. But maybe that's just a deformation professionelle? I spend a lot of time working with automated theorem proving where there's no ifs and buts about conclusions following from premises.

[mannykannot]

If I am not mistaken, it does not necessarily follow unless it turns out to be a sound argument in every possible world.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Ah, so you are making a formal argument? In that case you should stick to formal language. And probably publish it in a different venue :)

[mannykannot]

No, I am simply responding to your rather formal point, in kind. Unless you are aguing for it being an established fact that the time evolution took to produce intelligent life rules out any form of reinforcement learning producing AI in any remotely reasonable period of time, then that original point of yours does not seem to be going anywhere.

In your work on theorem proving, am I right in guessing that there are no 'ifs' or 'buts' because the truth of premises is not an issue? In the "evolution argument", the premises/lemmas are not just that evolution took a long time, but also something along the lines of significant speedup not being possible.

You might notice that in another comment, I suggested that we might still be in the AI Cambrian. I'm not being inconsistent, as no-one knows for sure one way or the other.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

I didn't make a formal point- my comment is a comment on an internet message board, where it's very unlikely to find formal arguments being made. But perhaps we do not agree on what constitutes a "(rather) formal point"? I made a point in informal language and in a casual manner and as part of an informal discussion ... on Hacker News. We are not going to prove or disprove any theorems here.

But, to be sure, as is common when this kind of informal conversation suddendly sprouts semi-formal language, like "argument", "claim", "proof", "necessarily follows" etc, I am not even sure what exactly it is we are arguing about, anymore. What exactly is your disagreement with my comment? Could you please explain?

[mannykannot]

"Necessarily" has general usage as well, you know... why would you read it otherwise, especially given the reasonable observation you make about this site? And my original point is not actually wrong, either: whether reinforcement learning will proceed at the pace of evolution is a topic of speculation - it is possible that it will, and possible that it will not.

Insofar is I have an issue with your comment, it is that it is not going anywhere, as I explained in my previous post.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> Insofar is I have an issue with your comment, it is that it is not going anywhere, as I explained in my previous post.

I see this god-moding of my comment as a pretend-polite way to tell me I'm takling nonsense, that seems to be designed to avoid criticism for being rude to one's interlocutor on a site that has strong norms against that sort of thing, but without really trying to understand why those norms exist, i.e. because they make for more productive conversations and less wasting of everyone's time.

You made a comment to say that unless I claim that X (which you came up with), then my comment is not going anywhere. The intellectually corteous and honest response to a comment with which one does not agree is to try and understand the reasoning of the comment. Not to claim that there is only one possible explanation and therefore the comment must be wrong. That is just a straw man in sheep's clothing.

And this is not surprising given that it comes at the heels of nitpicking about supposedly important terminology (necessarily!). This is how discussions like this one go, very often. And that's why they should be avoided, because they just waste everyone's time.