For what it’s worth, I think my qualitative predictions in this essay were good, but because I was consistently putting 50% chance on the current path of AI scaling hitting limits, my “median world” looks less impressive than you might expect. I think I flagged this in the conversation—this “median” world I’m describing is basically “the current paradigm works, but barely”.
I think the world we’re actually in is more like my 75th percentile at that time (or, equivalently, my median conditioning on the current paradigm continuing to work well). So I think Daniel’s predictions were actually better here, because he didn’t have this hedge. I don’t know how you can read that post and come away thinking I was better at the specific numerical forecasts that have resolved thus far.
There’s a more interesting question of whether I was right ex ante or not, and I think given what we knew at the time my predictions weren’t unreasonable. But it’s hard to litigate a difference of 1 bit of evidence (which is all that a 50% hedge amounts to) between two forecasts in a domain like this.
For what it’s worth, I think my qualitative predictions in this essay were good, but because I was consistently putting 50% chance on the current path of AI scaling hitting limits, my “median world” looks less impressive than you might expect. I think I flagged this in the conversation—this “median” world I’m describing is basically “the current paradigm works, but barely”.
I think the world we’re actually in is more like my 75th percentile at that time (or, equivalently, my median conditioning on the current paradigm continuing to work well). So I think Daniel’s predictions were actually better here, because he didn’t have this hedge. I don’t know how you can read that post and come away thinking I was better at the specific numerical forecasts that have resolved thus far.
There’s a more interesting question of whether I was right ex ante or not, and I think given what we knew at the time my predictions weren’t unreasonable. But it’s hard to litigate a difference of 1 bit of evidence (which is all that a 50% hedge amounts to) between two forecasts in a domain like this.