I don’t remember if I put down “inside view” on the form when filling it out but that does sound like the type of thing I may have done. I think I might have been overly eager at the time to say I had an “inside view” when what I really had was: confusion and disagreements with others’ methods for forecasting, weighing others’ forecasts in a mostly non-principled way, intuitions about AI progress that were maybe overly strong and as much or more based on hanging around a group of people and picking up their beliefs instead of evaluating evidence for myself. It feels really hard to not let the general vibe around me affect the process of thinking through things independently.
Based on the results, I would think more people thinking about this for themselves and writing up their reasoning or even rough intuitions would be good. I suspect my beliefs are more influenced by the people that ranked high in survey answers than I’d want them to be because it turns out people around me are deferring to the same few people. Even when I think I have my own view on something, it is very largely affected by the fact that Ajeya said 2040/2050 and Daniel Kokotajlo said 5⁄7 years, and the vibes have trickled down to me even though I would weigh their forecasts/methodology less if I were coming across it for the first time.
(The timelines question doesn’t feel that important to me for its own sake at the moment but I think it is a useful one to practise figuring out where my beliefs actually come from)
I don’t remember if I put down “inside view” on the form when filling it out but that does sound like the type of thing I may have done. I think I might have been overly eager at the time to say I had an “inside view” when what I really had was: confusion and disagreements with others’ methods for forecasting, weighing others’ forecasts in a mostly non-principled way, intuitions about AI progress that were maybe overly strong and as much or more based on hanging around a group of people and picking up their beliefs instead of evaluating evidence for myself. It feels really hard to not let the general vibe around me affect the process of thinking through things independently.
Based on the results, I would think more people thinking about this for themselves and writing up their reasoning or even rough intuitions would be good. I suspect my beliefs are more influenced by the people that ranked high in survey answers than I’d want them to be because it turns out people around me are deferring to the same few people. Even when I think I have my own view on something, it is very largely affected by the fact that Ajeya said 2040/2050 and Daniel Kokotajlo said 5⁄7 years, and the vibes have trickled down to me even though I would weigh their forecasts/methodology less if I were coming across it for the first time.
(The timelines question doesn’t feel that important to me for its own sake at the moment but I think it is a useful one to practise figuring out where my beliefs actually come from)