Yeah but “this theory sometimes correctly predicts the economy in a way no other theory has been capable of, and sometimes gets things totally wrong, and this theory says AI will cause extinction” is not unjustly privileging the hypothesis. It’s a mistake to say that theory “just isn’t very informative” when it’s been incredibly informative on lots of issues, even while mistaken on others.
Sure, and if you think that balance of successful / not-successful predictions means it makes sense to try to predict the future psychology of AIs on its basis, go for it.
But do so because you think it has a pretty good predictive record, not because there aren’t any other theories. If it has a bad predictive record then Rationality and Law doesn’t say “Well, if it’s the best you have, go for it,” but “Cast around for a less falsified theory, generate intuitions, don’t just use a hammer to fix your GPU because it’s the only tool you have.”
(Separately I do think that it is VNM + a bucket of other premises that lead generally towards extinction, not just VNM).
But it’s made tons of accurate predictions in game theory and microeconomics?
But it equally well breaks in tons of ways for every entity to which it is applied!
Aristotle still predicts stuff falls down.
Yeah but “this theory sometimes correctly predicts the economy in a way no other theory has been capable of, and sometimes gets things totally wrong, and this theory says AI will cause extinction” is not unjustly privileging the hypothesis. It’s a mistake to say that theory “just isn’t very informative” when it’s been incredibly informative on lots of issues, even while mistaken on others.
Sure, and if you think that balance of successful / not-successful predictions means it makes sense to try to predict the future psychology of AIs on its basis, go for it.
But do so because you think it has a pretty good predictive record, not because there aren’t any other theories. If it has a bad predictive record then Rationality and Law doesn’t say “Well, if it’s the best you have, go for it,” but “Cast around for a less falsified theory, generate intuitions, don’t just use a hammer to fix your GPU because it’s the only tool you have.”
(Separately I do think that it is VNM + a bucket of other premises that lead generally towards extinction, not just VNM).