I guess I just don’t feel like you’ve established that it would have been reasonable to have credence above 90% in either of those cases. Like, it sure seems obvious to me that computers and automobiles are super useful. But I have a huge amount of evidence now about both of those things that I can’t really un-condition on. So, given that I know how powerful hindsight bias can be, it feels like I’d need to really dig into the details of possible alternatives before I got much above 90% based on facts that were known back then.
(Although this depends on how we’re operationalising the claims. If the claim is just that there’s something useful which can be done with computers—sure, but that’s much less interesting. There’s also something useful that can be done with quantum computers, and yet it seems pretty plausible that they remain niche and relatively uninteresting.)
Fair. If you don’t share my intuition that people in 1950 should have had more than 90% credence that computers would be militarily useful, or that people at the dawn of steam engines should have predicted that automobiles would be useful (conditional on them being buildable) then that part of my argument has no force on you.
Maybe instead of picking examples from the past, I should pick an example of a future technology that everyone agrees is 90%+ likely to be super useful if developed, even though Joe’s skeptical arguments can still be made.
I guess I just don’t feel like you’ve established that it would have been reasonable to have credence above 90% in either of those cases. Like, it sure seems obvious to me that computers and automobiles are super useful. But I have a huge amount of evidence now about both of those things that I can’t really un-condition on. So, given that I know how powerful hindsight bias can be, it feels like I’d need to really dig into the details of possible alternatives before I got much above 90% based on facts that were known back then.
(Although this depends on how we’re operationalising the claims. If the claim is just that there’s something useful which can be done with computers—sure, but that’s much less interesting. There’s also something useful that can be done with quantum computers, and yet it seems pretty plausible that they remain niche and relatively uninteresting.)
Fair. If you don’t share my intuition that people in 1950 should have had more than 90% credence that computers would be militarily useful, or that people at the dawn of steam engines should have predicted that automobiles would be useful (conditional on them being buildable) then that part of my argument has no force on you.
Maybe instead of picking examples from the past, I should pick an example of a future technology that everyone agrees is 90%+ likely to be super useful if developed, even though Joe’s skeptical arguments can still be made.