I think the group of people “claiming the end of the world” in the case of AI x-risk is importantly more credentialed and reasonable-looking than most prior claims about the end of the world. From the reference class and general heuristics perspective that you’re talking about[1], I think how credible looking the people are is pretty important.
So, I think the reference class is more like claims of nuclear armageddon than cults. (Plausibly near maximally alarmist climate people are in a similar reference class.)
I agree this reference class is better, and implies a higher prior, but I think it’s reasonable for the prior over “arbitrary credentialed people warning about something” to be still relatively low in an absolute sense- lots of people have impressive sounding credentials that are not actually good evidence of competence (consider: it’s basically a meme at this point that whenever you see a book where the author puts “PhD” after their name, they probably are a grifter / their phd was probably kinda bs), and also there is a real negativity bias where fearmongering is amplified by both legacy and social media. Also, for the purposes of understanding normal people, it’s useful to keep in mind that trust in credentials and institutions is not very high right now in the US among genpop.
I think the group of people “claiming the end of the world” in the case of AI x-risk is importantly more credentialed and reasonable-looking than most prior claims about the end of the world. From the reference class and general heuristics perspective that you’re talking about[1], I think how credible looking the people are is pretty important.
So, I think the reference class is more like claims of nuclear armageddon than cults. (Plausibly near maximally alarmist climate people are in a similar reference class.)
IDK how I feel about this perspective overall.
I agree this reference class is better, and implies a higher prior, but I think it’s reasonable for the prior over “arbitrary credentialed people warning about something” to be still relatively low in an absolute sense- lots of people have impressive sounding credentials that are not actually good evidence of competence (consider: it’s basically a meme at this point that whenever you see a book where the author puts “PhD” after their name, they probably are a grifter / their phd was probably kinda bs), and also there is a real negativity bias where fearmongering is amplified by both legacy and social media. Also, for the purposes of understanding normal people, it’s useful to keep in mind that trust in credentials and institutions is not very high right now in the US among genpop.