It seems to me that the differences you measure between different theories here are entirely subsumed under N, the number of trials we have. For the Martin Luther theory, N=1 - Martin nailed up the theses twice. N=4 for Robin Hanson. I’m not sure how to measure N for Ray Kurzweil, but N for Moore’s Law is close to 25. Your argument for Moore’s Law seems mainly reliant on that: “robust for moves to very different technologies, and has spanned cultural transformations and changes in the purpose and uses of computers”—if any of the others had 25 examples, they would seem robust to all those things!
Both Robin’s model and Ray’s include Moore’s law as a part of their input data, so they have at least as many trials as it does. You can argue they don’t have as much info in the early eras, but simply counting the number of data points doesn’t put Moore’s law on top.
Robin’s model takes as a given that periods of exponential growth occur and argues for a pattern in the length and relative rate of periods of exponential growth. Thus, trials are either entire periods of exponential growth or the transitions between them.
It seems to me that the differences you measure between different theories here are entirely subsumed under N, the number of trials we have. For the Martin Luther theory, N=1 - Martin nailed up the theses twice. N=4 for Robin Hanson. I’m not sure how to measure N for Ray Kurzweil, but N for Moore’s Law is close to 25. Your argument for Moore’s Law seems mainly reliant on that: “robust for moves to very different technologies, and has spanned cultural transformations and changes in the purpose and uses of computers”—if any of the others had 25 examples, they would seem robust to all those things!
Both Robin’s model and Ray’s include Moore’s law as a part of their input data, so they have at least as many trials as it does. You can argue they don’t have as much info in the early eras, but simply counting the number of data points doesn’t put Moore’s law on top.
Robin’s model takes as a given that periods of exponential growth occur and argues for a pattern in the length and relative rate of periods of exponential growth. Thus, trials are either entire periods of exponential growth or the transitions between them.