Reading some of the critiques of Plan A online, I’m increasingly convinced that many people start with a premise that we live in a “normal” world, where only “normal” things happen. With that premise, anything that predicts that wild and crazy things could happen must be wrong. I think that premise is clearly empirically false, but it’s hard to see because all the previous wild and crazy reality-shifting things that have already happened are now accepted as “normal”.
Other examples: A Covid-19 pandemic also seemed intuitively highly implausible in early 2020 despite strong evidence that it could no longer be contained. Similarly with Russia being about to invade Ukraine in late 2021 / early 2022. There should be a term for this: *normal world bias*
Consider alternatively: People think that it is unlikely that specific predictions about which “wild” and “crazy” things will play out in the future will be correct, without actually thinking the present is all that’s possible.
This happens all the time. Where’s my flying car? Wait, it can drive itself now?
I mean, the AI Futures Project is in fact predicting a way bigger crazy reality-shift than anything that happened in our lifetime or, to a first approximation, ever.
The end of work! Extreme abundance! Immortality! The birth of a second, smarter species! Space colonization!
Compared to that, what reality-shifts happened recently? Smart phones?
I think that the worlds as it looks when we are growing up is forever set as the ‘normal’ world, and everything else is weird.
So, older people are probably more happy to think of the world as weird.
‘Normal’ and ‘likely’ are not the same. I always knew that in some sense the world we are in is unlikely but for me, the moment I really felt that I was in an unlikely world was when Trump’s ear was brushed by that bullet. Like, in the he dies or lives coin toss that is ‘it lands on the edge’ territory. And it plausibly had a huge impact on the world.
BTW, I wish I had clarified: I’m not talking about any of the detailed critiques that people have made, e.g. any of the critiques mentioned here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RPgHythvMKh6eG9pS/our-response-to-seb-krier-on-plan-a This was more inspired by a lot of quick comments I’ve seen that seem to dismiss Plan A at a high level without really engaging with the details much at all. I’ve seen these in lots of places but I don’t feel comfortable linking to them because they’re in a sort of conversational context and it seems norm-breaking to single out individual people for just writing a few sentences.
The probability that a wild prediction of the future will be true is low no matter how well reasoned it is. One should take the prior that the future will be insanely different but it is extremely hard to predict how it will be different.
Reading some of the critiques of Plan A online, I’m increasingly convinced that many people start with a premise that we live in a “normal” world, where only “normal” things happen. With that premise, anything that predicts that wild and crazy things could happen must be wrong. I think that premise is clearly empirically false, but it’s hard to see because all the previous wild and crazy reality-shifting things that have already happened are now accepted as “normal”.
Other examples: A Covid-19 pandemic also seemed intuitively highly implausible in early 2020 despite strong evidence that it could no longer be contained. Similarly with Russia being about to invade Ukraine in late 2021 / early 2022. There should be a term for this: *normal world bias*
Wikipedia—Normalcy bias
Consider alternatively: People think that it is unlikely that specific predictions about which “wild” and “crazy” things will play out in the future will be correct, without actually thinking the present is all that’s possible.
This happens all the time. Where’s my flying car? Wait, it can drive itself now?
I mean, the AI Futures Project is in fact predicting a way bigger crazy reality-shift than anything that happened in our lifetime or, to a first approximation, ever.
The end of work! Extreme abundance! Immortality! The birth of a second, smarter species! Space colonization!
Compared to that, what reality-shifts happened recently? Smart phones?
I think that the worlds as it looks when we are growing up is forever set as the ‘normal’ world, and everything else is weird.
So, older people are probably more happy to think of the world as weird.
‘Normal’ and ‘likely’ are not the same. I always knew that in some sense the world we are in is unlikely but for me, the moment I really felt that I was in an unlikely world was when Trump’s ear was brushed by that bullet. Like, in the he dies or lives coin toss that is ‘it lands on the edge’ territory. And it plausibly had a huge impact on the world.
BTW, I wish I had clarified: I’m not talking about any of the detailed critiques that people have made, e.g. any of the critiques mentioned here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RPgHythvMKh6eG9pS/our-response-to-seb-krier-on-plan-a This was more inspired by a lot of quick comments I’ve seen that seem to dismiss Plan A at a high level without really engaging with the details much at all. I’ve seen these in lots of places but I don’t feel comfortable linking to them because they’re in a sort of conversational context and it seems norm-breaking to single out individual people for just writing a few sentences.
I feel like any close, empathetic inspection of human history grants you decent access to that claim.
The probability that a wild prediction of the future will be true is low no matter how well reasoned it is. One should take the prior that the future will be insanely different but it is extremely hard to predict how it will be different.