Occultist (employed): foresight, forecasting, meditation.
aiechrl
Karma: 57
Hey, thank you @Mo Putera! That’s encouraging to hear. Drafting something else now, hopefully publishing soonish. Will let you know!
aiechrl’s Shortform
Hello, and thanks @habryka! I’ve been vaguely aware of LW for several years but only today published my first post after reading recent discussion about whether forecasting is ‘worth it.’
I have quite a specific perspective on this—I work in the tech industry as a product strategist, and the main way I do my work is using forecasting and foresight methods to help people make decisions.
I’m hoping this is a place where I can write more regularly; as well as broaden my knowledge of salient ideas in AI progress/safety & factory farming.
Otherwise, I’m interested in getting to know people in London so will look at attending upcoming meetups—am also a ‘serious’ meditator so always up for a sit.
Hey @Nathan Young—agreed on mechanism design and AI 2027 / more narrative or world-model artefacts.
I work as a product strategist & foresight type person in a tech company; incredibly, I’m still employed and the product teams find the work very useful for making decisions.
I’ve set out my views on why forecasting has failed to have the impact many expected, where there are signs of life, and how/why things need to be different if we want it to meaningfully shape how non-specialists think & act. I’d really welcome your view on some of this!
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/prNvmghPQyBivEakM/bloomberg-terminals-for-the-rest-of-us
I agree that newer projects like AI 2027 or world modelling are likely to be more useful to non specialists than Tetlock forecasts. At least, in my own work (foresight/product strategy in the tech industry), that’s been the case
It comes down to two things: first, that prediction market forecasting-as-practiced does not touch how the mind decides relevance. Which is how we can get better and better at forecasting and it still doesn’t mean that much to people who make decisions. Second, related, that we are trying to use an evaluative tool to do generative work, and this—more than anything else—is the major category error.
I’d be keen to hear your thoughts @elifland and @mabramov—have set out a view here, the tldr covers the main points:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/prNvmghPQyBivEakM/bloomberg-terminals-for-the-rest-of-us
I would encourage you to test your assumptions about others’ capacity for interiority, fear, hope, paralysis, confusion, commitment, and so on, compared with your own. In your resignation—“humanity is a failure,” “others don’t care,” “their ignorance, apathy, and meanness”—I think you make the mistake of putting the cart before the horse: you have separated yourself from others, derided them, and now (incorrectly, imo) complain they don’t care about what you care about.
Are you sure this resignation, veiled as a knowing sorrow, is justified? Are you sure that your enemy is really ‘other people’? Those ‘other people’ who vocally express widespread fear about AI capabilities, or oppose datacenter construction (however misguided)? That ‘they’ are simply ‘doing nothing’? That your enemy might not instead be those in power, those with control, those who regulate—with whom you actually align yourself here?
Put simply, are you sure that you are not just projecting your own defeatism onto the world at large?