Non-libertarians...tend to have somewhat more optimistic views on how likely things are to go well
...
Libertarians...tend to have more pessimistic views on our likelihood of making it through.
This claimed correlation between libertarianism and pessimism seemed surprising to me until I noticed that actually since we are conditioning on advocating-for-regulations, Berkson’s Bias would make this correlation appear even in a world where libertarianism and pessimism were completely uncorrelated in the general population.
Berkson’s Bias seems to be where you’re getting a subset of people that are some combination of trait X and trait Y; that is, to be included in the subset, X + Y > threshold. Here, “> threshold” seems to mean “willing to advocate for regulations”. It seems reasonably clear that “pessimism (about the default course of AI)” would make someone more willing to advocate for regulations, so we’ll call that X. Then Y is … “being non-libertarian”, I guess, since probably the more libertarian someone is, the more they hate regulations. Is that what you had in mind?
I would probably put it as “Since libertarians generally hate regulations, a libertarian willing to resort to regulations for AI must be very pessimistic about AI.”
Yeah, that seems like a plausible contributor to that effect.
Edit: though I think this is true even if you ignore “who’s calling for regulations” and just look at the relative optimism of various actors in the space, grouped by their politics.
This claimed correlation between libertarianism and pessimism seemed surprising to me until I noticed that actually since we are conditioning on advocating-for-regulations, Berkson’s Bias would make this correlation appear even in a world where libertarianism and pessimism were completely uncorrelated in the general population.
Berkson’s Bias seems to be where you’re getting a subset of people that are some combination of trait X and trait Y; that is, to be included in the subset, X + Y > threshold. Here, “> threshold” seems to mean “willing to advocate for regulations”. It seems reasonably clear that “pessimism (about the default course of AI)” would make someone more willing to advocate for regulations, so we’ll call that X. Then Y is … “being non-libertarian”, I guess, since probably the more libertarian someone is, the more they hate regulations. Is that what you had in mind?
I would probably put it as “Since libertarians generally hate regulations, a libertarian willing to resort to regulations for AI must be very pessimistic about AI.”
Yeah, that seems like a plausible contributor to that effect.
Edit: though I think this is true even if you ignore “who’s calling for regulations” and just look at the relative optimism of various actors in the space, grouped by their politics.