[mindcrime]

I mean, there's no question that he chose to branch out from strictly hard-core AI researchers. And I don't watch every episode, so I may have missed some of the "bad" ones, but from what I've seen, most of his interviewees are still respected / credible scientists, with a smattering of "other" mixed in here and there. In the past month or so he's had Jeffrey Shainline[1], Travis Oliphant[2], Jay McClelland[3], Douglas Lenat[4], Donald Knuth[5] and Joscha Bach[6] as guests. That's a pretty impressive group, IMO.

[1]: https://www.nist.gov/people/jeff-shainline

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travis_Oliphant

[3]: https://stanford.edu/~jlmcc/

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Lenat

[5]: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/

[6]: http://bach.ai/

[phreeza]

Yea I think I was overly harsh in my comment, see sibling reply for why this 'other' category gets me so riled up. If you ask me Joscha Bach is also somewhat in the category I mentioned, but I see your point.

[mindcrime]

Interesting. When I look at Joscha's background and work[1][2][3], he seems pretty credible to me. Is there anything specific he's said/done that puts him in your "other" category?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joscha_Bach

[2]: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Q_yeuCUAAAAJ&hl=en...

[3]: https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Synthetic-Intelligence-Arc...

[phreeza]

The only thing I know him from is his CCC talk, which is definitely interesting, even dazzling for all the ideas it ties together, but in the end it isn't really presenting anything new, so to me it is a bit of intellectual popcorn, like a TED-talk. I don't know anything about his actual research (which I think is unrelated to most of what he talks about) even though I did my PhD in an adjacent field. I believe as a researcher/teacher he is not in the same category as Peter Norvig and some of the other people you mentioned.

[mindcrime]

Gotcha. Sounds like we may have a difference of perspective. I am not familiar with the CCC talk you speak of, and am mostly familiar with Joscha's work (to the extent that I am, which is not "deeply" so) from his work on MicroPsi[1].

[1]: http://www.cognitive-ai.com/page2/page2.html

[phreeza]

I knew about Psi theory, from Dietrich Dörner, but not this.

[mindcrime]

I'm totally not an expert on this, but my understanding is that Bach's work on MicroPsi is a follow on / extension of Dörner's Psi theory.

[jcims]

Joscha is actually very accessible on Twitter (at least in replies to his tweets). Might be work picking apart one that sits funny with you to test your understanding of his positions.