In many ways, this post is frustrating to read. It isn’t straigthforward, it needlessly insults people, and it mixes irrelevant details with the key ideas.
And yet, as with many of Eliezer’s post, its key points are right.
What this post does is uncover the main epistemological mistakes made by almost everyone trying their hands at figuring out timelines. Among others, there is:
Taking arbitrary guesses within a set of options that you don’t have enough evidence to separate
Piling on arbitrary assumption on arbitraty assumption, leading to completely uninformative outputs
Comparing biological processes to human engineering in term of speed, without noticing that the optimization path is the key variable (and the big uncertainty)
Forcing the prediction to fit within a massively limited set of distributions, biasing it towards easy to think about distributions rather than representative ones.
Before reading this post I was already dubious of most timeline work, but this crystallized many of my objections and issues with this line of work.
So I got a lot out of this post. And I expect that many people would if they spent the time I took to analyze it in detail. But I don’t expect most people to do so, and so am ambivalent on whether this post should be included in the final selection.
In many ways, this post is frustrating to read. It isn’t straigthforward, it needlessly insults people, and it mixes irrelevant details with the key ideas.
And yet, as with many of Eliezer’s post, its key points are right.
What this post does is uncover the main epistemological mistakes made by almost everyone trying their hands at figuring out timelines. Among others, there is:
Taking arbitrary guesses within a set of options that you don’t have enough evidence to separate
Piling on arbitrary assumption on arbitraty assumption, leading to completely uninformative outputs
Comparing biological processes to human engineering in term of speed, without noticing that the optimization path is the key variable (and the big uncertainty)
Forcing the prediction to fit within a massively limited set of distributions, biasing it towards easy to think about distributions rather than representative ones.
Before reading this post I was already dubious of most timeline work, but this crystallized many of my objections and issues with this line of work.
So I got a lot out of this post. And I expect that many people would if they spent the time I took to analyze it in detail. But I don’t expect most people to do so, and so am ambivalent on whether this post should be included in the final selection.