I don’t know what you mean by “conservative about impact”
I mean predicting modest impact for reasons futurist maybe should predict modest impacts (like “existential catastrophes never happened before” or “novel technologies always plateau” or whole cluster of similar heuristics in opposition to “building safety buffer”).
It sounds like you’re saying “being rigorous and circumspect in your predictions will tend to yield probabilities much less than 10%”?
Not necessary “rigorous”—I’m not saying such thinking is definitely correct. I just can’t visualize thought process that arrives at 50% before correction, then applies conservative adjustment, because it’s all crazy, still gets 10% and proceeds to “then it’s fine”. So if survey respondents have higher probabilities and no complicated plan, then I don’t actually believe that opposite-of-engineering-conservatism mindset applies to them. Yes, maybe you mostly said things about not being decision-maker, but then what’s the point of that quote about bridges?
I don’t know what you mean by “conservative about impact”. The OP distinguishes three things:
conservatism in decision-making and engineering: building in safety buffer, erring on the side of caution.
non-conservatism in decision-making and engineering, that at least doesn’t shrug at things like “10% risk of killing all humans”.
non-conservatism that does shrug at medium-probability existential risks.
It separately distinguishes these two things:
forecasting “conservatism”, in the sense of being rigorous and circumspect in your predictions.
forecasting pseudo-conservatism (‘assuming without argument that everything will be normal and familiar indefinitely’).
It sounds like you’re saying “being rigorous and circumspect in your predictions will tend to yield probabilities much less than 10%”? I don’t know why you think that, and I obviously disagree, as do 91+% of the survey respondents in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QvwSr5LsxyDeaPK5s/existential-risk-from-ai-survey-results. See e.g. AGI Ruin for a discussion of why the risk looks super high to me.
I mean predicting modest impact for reasons futurist maybe should predict modest impacts (like “existential catastrophes never happened before” or “novel technologies always plateau” or whole cluster of similar heuristics in opposition to “building safety buffer”).
Not necessary “rigorous”—I’m not saying such thinking is definitely correct. I just can’t visualize thought process that arrives at 50% before correction, then applies conservative adjustment, because it’s all crazy, still gets 10% and proceeds to “then it’s fine”. So if survey respondents have higher probabilities and no complicated plan, then I don’t actually believe that opposite-of-engineering-conservatism mindset applies to them. Yes, maybe you mostly said things about not being decision-maker, but then what’s the point of that quote about bridges?