I don’t think many with monotonically increasing doom pay attention to current or any alignment research when they make their updates. I don’t think they’re using any model to base their estimates on. When you go and survey people, and pose the same timelines question phrased in two different ways, they give radically different answers.
I don’t think this survey is a good indicator, since it is very narrow in the questions.
If I was designing a survey to understand people’s predictions on AI progress, I would first do a bunch of qualitative questions asking them things like what models they are using, what they are paying attention to, what they expect to happen with AI, etc.. (And probably also other questions, such as whose analysis they know of and respect, etc.) This would help give a comprehensive list of perspectives that may inform people’s opinions.
Then I would take the qualitative perspectives and turn them into questions that more properly assess people’s perspectives. Only then can one really see whether the inconsistent answers people give really are so implausible, or if one is missing the bigger picture.
Ok, I went and looked at the survey (instead of just going based on memories of an 80k podcast that Ajeya was on where she stressed the existence of framing effects), and it is indeed very narrow, and looking at the effect of framing effects, I’m now less/not confident this is convincing to anyone who needs to be convinced that experts aren’t really using a model, but I still think that most likely don’t have a model, because people in general don’t usually have a model.
I don’t think this survey is a good indicator, since it is very narrow in the questions.
If I was designing a survey to understand people’s predictions on AI progress, I would first do a bunch of qualitative questions asking them things like what models they are using, what they are paying attention to, what they expect to happen with AI, etc.. (And probably also other questions, such as whose analysis they know of and respect, etc.) This would help give a comprehensive list of perspectives that may inform people’s opinions.
Then I would take the qualitative perspectives and turn them into questions that more properly assess people’s perspectives. Only then can one really see whether the inconsistent answers people give really are so implausible, or if one is missing the bigger picture.
Ok, I went and looked at the survey (instead of just going based on memories of an 80k podcast that Ajeya was on where she stressed the existence of framing effects), and it is indeed very narrow, and looking at the effect of framing effects, I’m now less/not confident this is convincing to anyone who needs to be convinced that experts aren’t really using a model, but I still think that most likely don’t have a model, because people in general don’t usually have a model.