A crude but useful characterization is that Situational Awareness is really really good at thinking about the long-term implications of AI
If SA had been good at thinking about AI implications, it would have been about the short-term implications: a rapid, monotonic death of SaaS and growth in AI hardware stocks. Their thesis itself demanded the factors that destroyed the fund: urgency, ultraconfident theoretician AI insider managers inexperienced with financial plumbing, the lack of risk management.
Endpoint bets are more common in forecasting than continuous path questions. And I doubt forecasting expertise implies expertise in posing the questions most relevant to a given agenda. Co-manager Carl Shulman is a forecasting expert. It makes me wonder if part of the conversation around whether forecasting is overrated needs to include the possibility it doesn’t just fail to produce benefit, but that forecasting ability misleads when taken as a qualification and is overrated as an “alternative credential.”
But being constructive, it also makes me think that insofar as rationalists/EA are going to keep supporting forecasting, it might be worth putting the emphasis on these more neglected areas of handling continuous, path-dependent forecasts, technique for crafting questions genuinely relevant to specific agendas instead of their convenient-to-resolve and fun-to-think-about proxies, and the reflexivity issues that ensue when there are other reasons to make a public bet or confident public prediction than being right.
If SA had been good at thinking about AI implications, it would have been about the short-term implications: a rapid, monotonic death of SaaS and growth in AI hardware stocks. Their thesis itself demanded the factors that destroyed the fund: urgency, ultraconfident theoretician AI insider managers inexperienced with financial plumbing, the lack of risk management.
Endpoint bets are more common in forecasting than continuous path questions. And I doubt forecasting expertise implies expertise in posing the questions most relevant to a given agenda. Co-manager Carl Shulman is a forecasting expert. It makes me wonder if part of the conversation around whether forecasting is overrated needs to include the possibility it doesn’t just fail to produce benefit, but that forecasting ability misleads when taken as a qualification and is overrated as an “alternative credential.”
But being constructive, it also makes me think that insofar as rationalists/EA are going to keep supporting forecasting, it might be worth putting the emphasis on these more neglected areas of handling continuous, path-dependent forecasts, technique for crafting questions genuinely relevant to specific agendas instead of their convenient-to-resolve and fun-to-think-about proxies, and the reflexivity issues that ensue when there are other reasons to make a public bet or confident public prediction than being right.