Right. I think this is different in AGI timelines because standard human expertise/intuition doesn’t apply nearly as well as in the intelligence analyst predictions.
But outside of that speculation, what you really want is predictions from people who have both prediction expertise and deep domain expertise. Averaging in a lot of opinions is probably not helping in a domain so far outside of standard human intuitions.
I think predictions in this domain usually don’t have a specific end-point in mind. They define AGI by capabilities. But the path through mind-space is not at all linear; it probably has strong nonlinearities in both directions. The prediction end-point is in a totally different space than the one in which progress occurs.
Standard intuitions like “projects take a lot longer than their creators and advocates think they will” are useful. But in this case, most people doing the prediction have no gears-level model of the path to AGI, because they have no, or at most a limited, gears-level model of how AGI would work. That is a sharp contrast to thinking about political predictions and almost every other arena of prediction.
So I’d prefer a single prediction from an expert with some gears-level models of AGI for different paths, over all of the prediction experts in the world who lack that crucial cognitive tool.
Right. I think this is different in AGI timelines because standard human expertise/intuition doesn’t apply nearly as well as in the intelligence analyst predictions.
But outside of that speculation, what you really want is predictions from people who have both prediction expertise and deep domain expertise. Averaging in a lot of opinions is probably not helping in a domain so far outside of standard human intuitions.
I think predictions in this domain usually don’t have a specific end-point in mind. They define AGI by capabilities. But the path through mind-space is not at all linear; it probably has strong nonlinearities in both directions. The prediction end-point is in a totally different space than the one in which progress occurs.
Standard intuitions like “projects take a lot longer than their creators and advocates think they will” are useful. But in this case, most people doing the prediction have no gears-level model of the path to AGI, because they have no, or at most a limited, gears-level model of how AGI would work. That is a sharp contrast to thinking about political predictions and almost every other arena of prediction.
So I’d prefer a single prediction from an expert with some gears-level models of AGI for different paths, over all of the prediction experts in the world who lack that crucial cognitive tool.