Why not use the real model to sample a trajectory? We should indeed have done that, but it was annoying and would have taken more time & this 15% thing seemed a good enough approximation given the massive error bars and uncertainty involved. It’s not like we had the real trajectory sample ready to go and decided to do the 15% thing instead.
I’m currently watching the tension between “this is just a story [which doesn’t have hard data behind it, take it with a big grain of salt]” and “here’s some math supporting our estimates [but wasn’t actually used for our plots or the story in any direct way].” I’m worried that the math lends credibility without being that relevant to the real decisions.
I agree we should have been more clear about various things. Like, we have our scenario. Why did we choose to depict takeoff in 2027? Because at the time we were writing, that was my median. (Over the course of writing, my median shifted to 2028. Eli’s meanwhile was always longer, more like 2032 iirc. This is awkward but nbd, we all still think 2027 is plausible. We even said in the very first footnote that our actual medians were somewhat later than what the scenario depicts, and that the scenario depicts something more like our mode. And iirc I said it to Kevin Roose as well in the initial interview.) OK, so why should people take seriously our median/mode/etc. and our views on timelines more generally? Well, we weren’t claiming people should trust us absolutely or anything like that. We think that we’ve done an unusually high amount of thinking and research on the topic and have good track records, but we aren’t asking people to trust us. We put up our latest thoughts on timelines (at least, latest-at-the-time-of-writing, so early 2025) on the webpage, for all to see and critique. We are hoping and planning to continue to improve our models of everything.
Why not use the real model to sample a trajectory? We should indeed have done that, but it was annoying and would have taken more time & this 15% thing seemed a good enough approximation given the massive error bars and uncertainty involved. It’s not like we had the real trajectory sample ready to go and decided to do the 15% thing instead.
I agree we should have been more clear about various things. Like, we have our scenario. Why did we choose to depict takeoff in 2027? Because at the time we were writing, that was my median. (Over the course of writing, my median shifted to 2028. Eli’s meanwhile was always longer, more like 2032 iirc. This is awkward but nbd, we all still think 2027 is plausible. We even said in the very first footnote that our actual medians were somewhat later than what the scenario depicts, and that the scenario depicts something more like our mode. And iirc I said it to Kevin Roose as well in the initial interview.) OK, so why should people take seriously our median/mode/etc. and our views on timelines more generally? Well, we weren’t claiming people should trust us absolutely or anything like that. We think that we’ve done an unusually high amount of thinking and research on the topic and have good track records, but we aren’t asking people to trust us. We put up our latest thoughts on timelines (at least, latest-at-the-time-of-writing, so early 2025) on the webpage, for all to see and critique. We are hoping and planning to continue to improve our models of everything.