Wherein I Am Ripped to Pieces

From an exchange with a person called "Roko" (their comments are italicized):

It seems that Dale’s primary argument is a factual one not an axiological one: he is arguing that all this technology stuff is hyperbolae, that it ain’t gonna happen.

My primary argument is that superlative aspirations are conceptually confused to the point of illegibility, and that their advocacy amounts to a faith-based initiative. One would expect in consequence that, despite their protestations to the contrary that they are consummate scientists, superlative futurists would have little empirical evidence to show of being taken seriously by actual scientists (citations in scholarly journals, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, and nano-cornucopiasts in a competing diversity of academic labs with real grants, and so on). And precisely this is the case.

Marginality matters where one wants to claim the mantle of consensus science for one’s advocacy, as it does not necessarily matter where one wants to defend, say, the validity of an unpopular aesthetic judgment or political position.

Such an argument needs to be prosecuted in a more rigorous way than Dale is capable of.

This is laugh out loud funny to me. My whole point is that you people don’t even grasp the genre of argument you are making, let alone the criteria of warrant properly associated with it. You don’t grasp that your perpetual motion machines and square the circle pamphlets don’t constitute science at all in their essential claims (that is to say the claims that are their unique contribution, as against the scientific and policy claims they nibble at the edges of, the claims nobody needs to join a Robot Cult to make contact with). Superlative claims seem to me to be essentially theological, aesthetic, and moral(istic), and those are the terms in which I seek to understand them and critique them.

I challenge Dale to post to Less Wrong an argument whose conclusion is that the probability of smarter than human AI within the next 100 years is less than 0.1%. He will be ripped to pieces.

I challenge you all to stop writing checks you can’t cash and just go burrow off to your secret genius labs in the asteroid belt and code your superintelligent postbiological Robot God or your drextechian genie in a bottle or your sooper immortal cyborg shell, whereupon I’ll genuflect to your quasi-deified super-predicated post-self all the livelong day in the most edifying fashion imaginable, if you like. The same goes to fundamentalists who can gloat from their perches on heavenly clouds as I roast after death in some hell-nook for my atheism or the gay thing or whatever.