Did people say why they deferred to these people?
No, only asked respondents to give names
I think another interesting question to correlate this would be “If you believe AI x-risk is a severely important issue, what year did you come to believe that?”.
Agree, that would have been interesting to ask
Finally posted: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qccxb3uzwFDsRuJuP/deference-on-ai-timelines-survey-results