I find it very annoying when people give dismissals of technology trendlines because they don’t have any credence in straight lines on a graph. Often people will post a meme like the following, or something even dumber.
I feel like it’s really obvious why the two situations are dissimilar, but just to spell it out: the growth rate of human children is something we have overwhelming evidence for. Like literally we have something like 10 billion to 100 billion data points of extremely analogous situations against the exponential model.
And this isn’t even including the animal data! Which should conservatively give you another 10-100x factor difference.
(This is merely if you’re a base rates/forecasting chartist like me, and without even including physical and biological plausibility arguments).
So if someone starts with an exponential model of child growth, with appropriate error bars, they quickly update against it because they have something like > A TRILLION TO ONE EVIDENCE AGAINST.
But people think their arguments against Moore’s Law, or AI scaling lows, or the METR time horizon curve, or w/e, merely because they don’t believe in lines on a curve are sneaking in the assumption that “it definitely doesn’t work” from a situation with a trillion to one evidence against on chartist grounds, plus physical plausibility arguments, when they have not in fact provided a trillion to one evidence against in their case.
I find it very annoying when people give dismissals of technology trendlines because they don’t have any credence in straight lines on a graph. Often people will post a meme like the following, or something even dumber.
I feel like it’s really obvious why the two situations are dissimilar, but just to spell it out: the growth rate of human children is something we have overwhelming evidence for. Like literally we have something like 10 billion to 100 billion data points of extremely analogous situations against the exponential model.
And this isn’t even including the animal data! Which should conservatively give you another 10-100x factor difference.
(This is merely if you’re a base rates/forecasting chartist like me, and without even including physical and biological plausibility arguments).
So if someone starts with an exponential model of child growth, with appropriate error bars, they quickly update against it because they have something like > A TRILLION TO ONE EVIDENCE AGAINST.
But people think their arguments against Moore’s Law, or AI scaling lows, or the METR time horizon curve, or w/e, merely because they don’t believe in lines on a curve are sneaking in the assumption that “it definitely doesn’t work” from a situation with a trillion to one evidence against on chartist grounds, plus physical plausibility arguments, when they have not in fact provided a trillion to one evidence against in their case.
I am not familiar with these debates, but I have a feeling that you’re arguing against a strawman here.