My quoted summary:
I’m not that happy with framing our analysis choices here as “surface analogies” versus “inside views.” ...
The issue is what abstractions are [ed. remove - "how"] useful for what purposes, not what features are “deep” vs. “surface.” ...
I claim academic studies of innovation and economic growth offer relevant abstractions for understanding the future creation of machine minds, and that in terms of these abstractions the previous major singularities, such as humans, farming, and industry, are relevantly similar. Eliezer prefers “optimization” abstractions.
Today's post, Abstraction, Not Analogy was originally published on November 19, 2008. A summary:
Describing certain arguments as analogies misses much of the point of those arguments. In order to generate predictions, we often ignore certain information in favor of more relevant information. These sorts of abstractions succeed or fail based on whether or not they successfully capture the important details.
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