I hate talking about “P(doom)”. When it first started showing up in the wake of ChatGPT
This got me curious about when the term originated, because I thought I remembered it popping up in the late 2021 MIRI conversations. I found that Rohin Shah indeed used it in one of those, but I’m not sure whether he coined it there and then or whether it was already floating around.
Anyway, the basic point is that if you are interested in DOOM, or p(DOOM), consulting a DOOM-mongering organisation, that wants your dollars to help them SAVE THE WORLD may not be your best move.
I couldn’t find any uses of the term in between those two, so I’m guessing that timtyler’s use was independent of Rohin’s, and either Rohin coined it during that dialogue or people had started using it in private discussion shortly before then. I’m in the market for people with better Google-Fu to prove me wrong about this though.
This got me curious about when the term originated, because I thought I remembered it popping up in the late 2021 MIRI conversations. I found that Rohin Shah indeed used it in one of those, but I’m not sure whether he coined it there and then or whether it was already floating around.
This wiktionary page has an uncited claim that it originated on LessWrong in 2010. I managed to find this −4 karma comment from 2010 by timtyler (on Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism), which says, in the context of arguing that MIRI have an incentive to exaggerate the risks from AI in order to get funding:
I couldn’t find any uses of the term in between those two, so I’m guessing that timtyler’s use was independent of Rohin’s, and either Rohin coined it during that dialogue or people had started using it in private discussion shortly before then. I’m in the market for people with better Google-Fu to prove me wrong about this though.
Edit: turns out this is already documented: Tim Tyler claims to have started using it in about 2009. I’m still curious on the path between in 09⁄10 and Rohin in 2021.
Thanks. I’ll update my language to be more clear.