I've been thinking that there are parallels between building FAI and Talmud-- it's an effort to manage an extremely dangerous, uncommunicative entity through deduction. (An FAI may be communicative to some extent. An FAI which hasn't been built yet doesn't communicate.)
Being an atheist doesn't eliminate cultural influence. Survey for atheists: which God do you especially not believe in?
I was talking about FAI with Gene Treadwell, who's black. He was quite concerned that the FAI would be sentient, but owned and controlled.
This doesn't mean that either Eliezer or Gene are wrong (or right for that matter), but it suggests to me that culture gives defaults which might be strong attractors. [1]
He recommended recruiting Japanese members, since they're more apt to like and trust robots.
I don't know about explaining ourselves, but we may need more angles on the problem just to be able to do the work.
[1] See also Timothy Leary's S.M.I.2L.E.-- Space Migration, Increased Intelligence, Life Extension. Robert Anton Wilson said that was match for Catholic hopes of going to heaven, being trajnsfigured, and living forever.
He recommended recruiting Japanese members, since they're more apt to like and >trust robots.
He has a very good point. I was surprised more Japanese or Koreans hadn't made their way to Lesswrong. This was my motivation for first proposing we recruit translators for Japanese and Chinese and to begin working towards a goal of making at least the sequences available in many languages.
Not being a native speaker of English proved a significant barrier for me in some respects. The first noticeable one was spelling, I however solved the problem by outsourci...
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