There’s definitely a bias/selection effect pushing this community towards having shorter timelines. However, there’s also definitely a bias/selection effect pushing the world in general towards having longer timelines—the anti-weirdness heuristic, wanting-to-not-sound-like-a-crackpot heuristic, wanting-to-sound-like-a-sober-skeptic bias, and probably lots of others that I’m not thinking of. Oh yeah, and just general ignorance of history and the topic of tech progress in particular. I suspect that on the whole, the biases pushing people towards longer timelines are stronger than the biases pushing people towards shorter timelines. (Obviously it differs case by case; in some people the biases are stronger one way, in other people the biases are stronger in the other way. And in a few rare individuals the biases mostly cancel out or are not strong in the first place.)
I generally prefer to make up my mind about important questions by reasoning them through on the object level, rather than by trying to guess which biases are strongest and then guess how much I should adjust to correct for them. And I especially recommend doing that in this case.
There’s definitely a bias/selection effect pushing this community towards having shorter timelines. However, there’s also definitely a bias/selection effect pushing the world in general towards having longer timelines—the anti-weirdness heuristic, wanting-to-not-sound-like-a-crackpot heuristic, wanting-to-sound-like-a-sober-skeptic bias, and probably lots of others that I’m not thinking of. Oh yeah, and just general ignorance of history and the topic of tech progress in particular. I suspect that on the whole, the biases pushing people towards longer timelines are stronger than the biases pushing people towards shorter timelines. (Obviously it differs case by case; in some people the biases are stronger one way, in other people the biases are stronger in the other way. And in a few rare individuals the biases mostly cancel out or are not strong in the first place.)
I generally prefer to make up my mind about important questions by reasoning them through on the object level, rather than by trying to guess which biases are strongest and then guess how much I should adjust to correct for them. And I especially recommend doing that in this case.