The Meta-LessWrong Doomsday Argument (MLWDA) predicts long AI timelines and that we can relax:
LessWrong was founded in 2009 (16 years ago), and there have been 44 mentions of the ‘Doomsday argument’ prior to this one, and it is now 2025, at 2.75 mentions per year.
By the Doomsday argument, we medianly-expect mentions to stop in: after 44 additional mentions over 16 additional years or in 2041. (And our 95% CI on that 44 would then be +1 mention to +1,1760 mentions, corresponding to late-2027 AD to 2665 AD.)
By a curious coincidence, double-checking to see if really no one had made a meta-DA before, it turns out that Alexey Turchin has made a meta-DA as well about 7 years ago, calculating that
If we assume 1993 as the beginning of a large DA-Doomers reference class, and it is 2018 now (at the moment of writing this text), the age of the DA-Doomers class is 25 years. Then, with 50% probability, the reference class of DA-Doomers will disappear in 2043, according to Gott’s equation! Interestingly, the dates around 2030–2050 appear in many different predictions of the singularity or the end of the world (Korotayev 2018; Turchin & Denkenberger 2018b; Kurzweil 2006).
His estimate of 2043 is surprisingly close to 2041.
We offer no explanation as to why this numerical consilience of meta-DA calculations has happened; we attribute their success, as all else, to divine benevolence.
Regrettably, the 2041--2043 date range would seem to imply that it is unlikely we will obtain enough samples of the MLWDA in order to compute a Meta-Meta-LessWrong Doomsday Argument (MMLWDA) with non-vacuous confidence intervals, inasmuch as every mention of the MLWDA would be expected to contain a mention of the DA as well.
I’ve thought about the doomsday argument more than daily for the past 15 years, enough for me to go from “Why am I improbably young?” to “Oh, I guess I’m just a person who thinks about the doomsday argument a lot”
Fun “fact”: when a person thinks about the doomsday argument, they a decent change of being me.
This is an alarming point, as I find myself thinking about the DA today as well; I thought I was ‘gwern’, but it is possible I am ‘robo’ instead, if robo represents such a large fraction of LW-DA observer-moments. It would be bad to be mistaken about my identity like that. I should probably generate some random future dates and add them to my Google Calendar to check whether I am thinking about the DA that day and so have evidence I am actually robo instead.
I think taking in to account the Meta-Meta-LessWrong Doomsday Analysis (MMLWDA) reveals an even deeper truth: your calculation fails to account for the exponential memetic acceleration of doomsday-reference-self-reference.
You’ve correctly considered that before your post, there were 44 mentions in 16 years (2.75/year); however, now you’ve created the MLWDA argument—noticeably more meta than previous mentions. This meta-ness increase is quite likely to trigger cascading self-referential posts (including this one).
The correct formulation should incorporate the Meta-Meta-Carcinization Principle (MMCP): all online discourse eventually evolves into recursive self-reference at an accelerating rate. Given my understanding of historical precedent from similar rat and rat adjacent memes, I’d estimate approximately 12-15 direct meta-responses to your post within the next month alone, and see no reason to expect the exponential to turn sigmoid in timescales that render my below argument unlikely.
This actually implies a much sooner endpoint distribution—the discourse will become sufficiently meta by approximately November 2027 that it will collapse into a singularity of self-reference, rendering further mentions both impossible and unnecessary.
I’d estimate approximately 12-15 direct meta-responses to your post within the next month alone, and see no reason to expect the exponential to turn sigmoid in timescales that render my below argument unlikely.
However, you can’t use this argument because unlike the MLWDA, where I am arguably a random observer of LW DA instances (the thought was provoked by Michael Nielsen linking to Cosma Shalizi’s notes on Mesopotamia and me thinking that the temporal distances are much less impressive if you think of them in terms of ‘nth human to live’, which immediately reminded me of DA and made me wonder if anyone had done a ‘meta-DA’, and LW simply happened to be the most convenient corpus I knew of to accurately quantify ‘# of mentions’ as tools like Google Scholar or Google N-Grams have a lot of issues—I have otherwise never taken much of an interest in the DA and AFAIK there have been no major developments recently), you are in a temporally privileged position with the MMLWDA, inasmuch as you are the first responder to my MLWDA right now, directly building on it in a non-randomly-chosen-in-time fashion.
Thus, you have to appeal purely to non-DA grounds like making a parametric assumption or bringing in informative priors from ‘similar rat and rat adjacent memes’, and that’s not a proper MMLWDA. That’s just a regular old prediction.
Turchin actually notes this issue in his paper, in the context of, of course, the DA and why the inventor Brandon Carter could not make a Meta-DA (but he and I could):
The problem is that if I think that I am randomly chosen from all DA-Doomers, we get very strong version of DA, as ‘DA-Doomers’ appeared only recently and thus the end should be very soon, in just a few decades from now. The first member of the DA-Doomers reference class was Carter, in 1973, joined by just a few of his friends in the 1980s. (It was rumored that Carter recognized the importance of DA-doomers class and understood that he was first member of it – and thus felt that this “puts” world in danger, as if he was the first in the class, the class is likely to be very short. Anyway, his position was not actually random as he was the first discoverer of the DA).
The Meta-LessWrong Doomsday Argument (MLWDA) predicts long AI timelines and that we can relax:
LessWrong was founded in 2009 (16 years ago), and there have been 44 mentions of the ‘Doomsday argument’ prior to this one, and it is now 2025, at 2.75 mentions per year.
By the Doomsday argument, we medianly-expect mentions to stop in: after 44 additional mentions over 16 additional years or in 2041. (And our 95% CI on that 44 would then be +1 mention to +1,1760 mentions, corresponding to late-2027 AD to 2665 AD.)
By a curious coincidence, double-checking to see if really no one had made a meta-DA before, it turns out that Alexey Turchin has made a meta-DA as well about 7 years ago, calculating that
His estimate of 2043 is surprisingly close to 2041.
We offer no explanation as to why this numerical consilience of meta-DA calculations has happened; we attribute their success, as all else, to divine benevolence.
Regrettably, the 2041--2043 date range would seem to imply that it is unlikely we will obtain enough samples of the MLWDA in order to compute a Meta-Meta-LessWrong Doomsday Argument (MMLWDA) with non-vacuous confidence intervals, inasmuch as every mention of the MLWDA would be expected to contain a mention of the DA as well.
I’ve thought about the doomsday argument more than daily for the past 15 years, enough for me to go from “Why am I improbably young?” to “Oh, I guess I’m just a person who thinks about the doomsday argument a lot”
Fun “fact”: when a person thinks about the doomsday argument, they a decent change of being me.
This is an alarming point, as I find myself thinking about the DA today as well; I thought I was ‘gwern’, but it is possible I am ‘robo’ instead, if robo represents such a large fraction of LW-DA observer-moments. It would be bad to be mistaken about my identity like that. I should probably generate some random future dates and add them to my Google Calendar to check whether I am thinking about the DA that day and so have evidence I am actually robo instead.
Nice example of taking inside view vs outside view seriously.
I think taking in to account the Meta-Meta-LessWrong Doomsday Analysis (MMLWDA) reveals an even deeper truth: your calculation fails to account for the exponential memetic acceleration of doomsday-reference-self-reference.
You’ve correctly considered that before your post, there were 44 mentions in 16 years (2.75/year); however, now you’ve created the MLWDA argument—noticeably more meta than previous mentions. This meta-ness increase is quite likely to trigger cascading self-referential posts (including this one).
The correct formulation should incorporate the Meta-Meta-Carcinization Principle (MMCP): all online discourse eventually evolves into recursive self-reference at an accelerating rate. Given my understanding of historical precedent from similar rat and rat adjacent memes, I’d estimate approximately 12-15 direct meta-responses to your post within the next month alone, and see no reason to expect the exponential to turn sigmoid in timescales that render my below argument unlikely.
This actually implies a much sooner endpoint distribution—the discourse will become sufficiently meta by approximately November 2027 that it will collapse into a singularity of self-reference, rendering further mentions both impossible and unnecessary.
However, you can’t use this argument because unlike the MLWDA, where I am arguably a random observer of LW DA instances (the thought was provoked by Michael Nielsen linking to Cosma Shalizi’s notes on Mesopotamia and me thinking that the temporal distances are much less impressive if you think of them in terms of ‘nth human to live’, which immediately reminded me of DA and made me wonder if anyone had done a ‘meta-DA’, and LW simply happened to be the most convenient corpus I knew of to accurately quantify ‘# of mentions’ as tools like Google Scholar or Google N-Grams have a lot of issues—I have otherwise never taken much of an interest in the DA and AFAIK there have been no major developments recently), you are in a temporally privileged position with the MMLWDA, inasmuch as you are the first responder to my MLWDA right now, directly building on it in a non-randomly-chosen-in-time fashion.
Thus, you have to appeal purely to non-DA grounds like making a parametric assumption or bringing in informative priors from ‘similar rat and rat adjacent memes’, and that’s not a proper MMLWDA. That’s just a regular old prediction.
Turchin actually notes this issue in his paper, in the context of, of course, the DA and why the inventor Brandon Carter could not make a Meta-DA (but he and I could):