I expect this to backfire with most people because it seems that their concept of the authors hasn’t updated in sync with the authors, and so they will feel that when their concept of the authors finally updates, it will seem very intensely like changing predictions to match evidence post-hoc. So I think they should make more noise about that, eg by loudly renaming AI 2027 to, eg, “If AI was 2027” or something. Many people (possibly even important ones) seem to me to judge public figures’ claims based on the perceiver’s conception of the public figure rather than fully treating their knowledge of a person and the actual person as separate. This is especially relevant for people who are not yet convinced and are using the boldness of AI 2027 as reason to update against it, and for those people, making noise to indicate you’re staying in sync with the evidence would be useful. It’ll likely be overblown into “wow, they backed out of their prediction! see? ai doesn’t work!” by some, but I think the longer term effect is to establish more credibility with normal people, eg by saying “nearly unchanged: 2028 not 2027” as your five words to make the announcement.
We are worried about this too and thinking of ways to mitigate it. I don’t like the idea of renaming the scenario itself though, it seems like a really expensive/costly way to signal-boost something we have been saying since the beginning. But maybe we just need to suck it up and do it.
If it helps, we are working on (a) a blog post explaining more about what our timelines are and how they’ve updated, and (b) an “AI 2032” scenario meant to be about as big and comprehensive as AI 2027, representing Eli’s median (whereas 2027 was my median last year). Ultimately we want to have multiple big scenarios up, not just one. It would be too difficult to keep changing the one to match our current views anyway.
Yeah, I think the title should be the best compression it can be, because for a lot of people, it’s what they’ll remember. But I understand not being eager to do it. It seems worth doing specifically because people seem to react to the title on its own. I definitely would think about what two-to-five words you want people saying when they think of it in order to correct as many misconceptions at once as possible—I’ve seen people, eg on reddit, pointing out your opinions have changed, so it’s not totally unknown. but people who are most inclined to be adversarial are the ones I’m most thinking need to be made to have a hard time rationalizing that you didn’t realize it.
Another scenario is just about as good for this purpose, probably. I’d strongly recommend making much more noise about intro-to-forecasting level stuff so that the first thing people who don’t get forecasts hear, eg on podcasts or by word of mouth, is the disclaimer about it intentionally being a maximum-likelihood-and-therefore-effectively-impossible no-surprises-happen scenario which will likely become incorrect quickly. You said it already, but most people who refer to it seem to use that very thing as a criticism! which is what leads me to say this.
I expect this to backfire with most people because it seems that their concept of the authors hasn’t updated in sync with the authors, and so they will feel that when their concept of the authors finally updates, it will seem very intensely like changing predictions to match evidence post-hoc. So I think they should make more noise about that, eg by loudly renaming AI 2027 to, eg, “If AI was 2027” or something. Many people (possibly even important ones) seem to me to judge public figures’ claims based on the perceiver’s conception of the public figure rather than fully treating their knowledge of a person and the actual person as separate. This is especially relevant for people who are not yet convinced and are using the boldness of AI 2027 as reason to update against it, and for those people, making noise to indicate you’re staying in sync with the evidence would be useful. It’ll likely be overblown into “wow, they backed out of their prediction! see? ai doesn’t work!” by some, but I think the longer term effect is to establish more credibility with normal people, eg by saying “nearly unchanged: 2028 not 2027” as your five words to make the announcement.
We are worried about this too and thinking of ways to mitigate it. I don’t like the idea of renaming the scenario itself though, it seems like a really expensive/costly way to signal-boost something we have been saying since the beginning. But maybe we just need to suck it up and do it.
If it helps, we are working on (a) a blog post explaining more about what our timelines are and how they’ve updated, and (b) an “AI 2032” scenario meant to be about as big and comprehensive as AI 2027, representing Eli’s median (whereas 2027 was my median last year). Ultimately we want to have multiple big scenarios up, not just one. It would be too difficult to keep changing the one to match our current views anyway.
Yeah, I think the title should be the best compression it can be, because for a lot of people, it’s what they’ll remember. But I understand not being eager to do it. It seems worth doing specifically because people seem to react to the title on its own. I definitely would think about what two-to-five words you want people saying when they think of it in order to correct as many misconceptions at once as possible—I’ve seen people, eg on reddit, pointing out your opinions have changed, so it’s not totally unknown. but people who are most inclined to be adversarial are the ones I’m most thinking need to be made to have a hard time rationalizing that you didn’t realize it.
Another scenario is just about as good for this purpose, probably. I’d strongly recommend making much more noise about intro-to-forecasting level stuff so that the first thing people who don’t get forecasts hear, eg on podcasts or by word of mouth, is the disclaimer about it intentionally being a maximum-likelihood-and-therefore-effectively-impossible no-surprises-happen scenario which will likely become incorrect quickly. You said it already, but most people who refer to it seem to use that very thing as a criticism! which is what leads me to say this.