The AI-Box Experiment

Is there a better way to read all this? http://www.sl4.org/archive/0203/index.html#3128

Yudowsky claims to have played the game several times, and won most of them. One of the "rules" is that nobody is allowed to talk about how he won. He no longer plays the game with anyone. More info here: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/AI-box_experiment#The_claims

Personally, I think he talked about how much good for the world could be done if he was let out, curing disease etc. Because his followers are bound by their identities as rationalist utilitarians, they had no choice but to comply, or deal with massive cognitive dissonance.

OR maybe he went meta and talked about the "infinite" potential positive outcomes of his freindly-AI project vs. a zero cost to them for complying in the AI box experiment, and persuaded them that by choosing to "lie" and say that the AI was persuasive, they are assuring their place in heaven. Like a sort of man-to-man pascals wager.

Either way I'm sure it was some kind of mister-spock style bullshit that would never work on a normal person. Like how the RAND corporation guys decided everyone was a sociopath because they only ever tested game theory on themselves.

You or I would surely just (metaphorically, I know it's not literally allowed) put a drinking bird on the "no" button à la homer simpson, and go to lunch. I believe he calls this "pre-commitment."

EDIT: as an addendum, I would pay hard cash to see derren brown play the game, perhaps with brown as the AI. If yudowsky wants to promote his ideas, he should arrange for brown to persuade a succession of skeptics to let him out, live on late night TV.

Is there a "rational" reason of keeping the chat log secret ?

Man, this sounds super interesting but those email threads are so unreadable. Is this typed down somewhere on a single page? Any button I can click?

If the logs were released, people all over the internet would start saying "I could've thought of that". With the logs hidden, everyone must honestly deal with the question "why didn't you?" If you think you know how to win, then go out and win. There's no shortage of people willing to play as gatekeepers against you.

Staring at an impossible problem and knowing that someone somewhere has successfully solved it is an amazing feeling. Most people can't deal with it and start saying undignified things. "Oh please release the logs, it's so unfair! How will we protect against bad AI otherwise? If you don't release, you're a fraud! Probably just some trick!", etc etc. But to some people it's a challenge, and those are the people that everyone will listen to. Like Justin Corwin, who played 20 games and won 18 of them, I think?