You don’t even have to go as far as to cryonics and AI to come up with examples of the outside view’s obvious failure. For example, mass production of 16nm processors has never happened in the course of history. Eh, technological advancement in general is a domain where outside view is useless, unless you resort to ‘meta-outside views’ like Kurzweil, such as predicting an increase in computing power because in the past computing power has increased.
Ultimately, I think the outside view is a heuristic that is sometimes useful and sometimes not; since actual outcomes are fully determined by “inside” causality.
The problem with taw’s argument is not that outside view has failed, he has simply made a bad choice of reference class. As noticed by a few commenters, the method chosen to find a reference class here, if it worked, would provide a fully general counterargument against the feasibility of any new technology. For any new technology, the class of previous attempts to do what it does is either empty, or a list of attempts with a 0% success rate. Yet somehow, despite this, new tech happens.
To use outside view in predicting new technology, we have to find a way to choose a reference class such that the track record of the reference class will distinguish between feasible attempts and utterly foolish ones.
You don’t even have to go as far as to cryonics and AI to come up with examples of the outside view’s obvious failure. For example, mass production of 16nm processors has never happened in the course of history. Eh, technological advancement in general is a domain where outside view is useless, unless you resort to ‘meta-outside views’ like Kurzweil, such as predicting an increase in computing power because in the past computing power has increased.
Ultimately, I think the outside view is a heuristic that is sometimes useful and sometimes not; since actual outcomes are fully determined by “inside” causality.
The problem with taw’s argument is not that outside view has failed, he has simply made a bad choice of reference class. As noticed by a few commenters, the method chosen to find a reference class here, if it worked, would provide a fully general counterargument against the feasibility of any new technology. For any new technology, the class of previous attempts to do what it does is either empty, or a list of attempts with a 0% success rate. Yet somehow, despite this, new tech happens.
To use outside view in predicting new technology, we have to find a way to choose a reference class such that the track record of the reference class will distinguish between feasible attempts and utterly foolish ones.