Dialogue with Eliezer Yudkowsky on FOOM

On the Hanson–Yudkowsky debate, local vs. global intelligence explosions, “content vs. architecture,” and what the old arguments predicted about modern AI This began as a Twitter/X thread after I read and tweeted about the Hanson–Yudkowsky AI–Foom Debate. Eliezer Yudkowsky joined the thread to object to my interpretation of the debate, and we ended up having the exchange reproduced below. I’ve preserved the dialogue verbatim, except for paragraphing, fixing obvious [typos] and expanding links. I’ve removed unrelated replies and moved a few pieces of context into bracketed editorial notes. Nothing has been rewritten for substance. Context Aashish Reddy : I have now finished reading The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate , which is basically 60 blog posts from Yudkowsky and Hanson over ~500 pages, a transcript of their in-person debate at Jane Street, a (good) summary by Kaj Sotala, and Yudkowsky’s ~100 page paper on “Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics”. I will take questions from those who do not wish to subject themselves to this. I judge the winner of the debate to have been Carl Shulman (whose contribution was two blog posts and a few feisty comment exchanges) Sophie Bücker : so uh why was carl the winner Aashish Reddy : One of the key points Hanson kept making was that Yudkowsky was over-reliant on abstractions he had come up with himself, rather than the “vetted” abstractions developed in the relevant academic fields, such as economics, and in particular, the endogenous…