The Metaculus community strikes me as a better starting point for evaluating how different the safety inside view is from a forecasting/outside view. The case for deferring to superforecasters is the same the case for deferring to the Metaculus community—their track record. What’s more, the most relevant comparison I know of scores Metaculus higher on AI predictions. Metaculus as a whole is not self-consistent on AI and extinction forecasting across individual questions (links below). However, I think it is fair to say that Metaculus as a whole has significantly faster timelines and P(doom) compared to superforecasters.
If we compare the distribution of safety researchers’ forecasts to Metaculus (maybe we have to set aside MIRI...), I don’t think there will be that much disagreement. I think remaining disagreement will often be that safety researchers aren’t being careful about how the letter and the spirit of the question can come apart and result in false negatives. In the one section of the FRI studies linked above I took a careful look at, the ARA section, I found that there was still huge ambiguity in how the question is operationalized—this could explain up to an OOM of disagreement in probabilities.
The Metaculus community strikes me as a better starting point for evaluating how different the safety inside view is from a forecasting/outside view. The case for deferring to superforecasters is the same the case for deferring to the Metaculus community—their track record. What’s more, the most relevant comparison I know of scores Metaculus higher on AI predictions. Metaculus as a whole is not self-consistent on AI and extinction forecasting across individual questions (links below). However, I think it is fair to say that Metaculus as a whole has significantly faster timelines and P(doom) compared to superforecasters.
If we compare the distribution of safety researchers’ forecasts to Metaculus (maybe we have to set aside MIRI...), I don’t think there will be that much disagreement. I think remaining disagreement will often be that safety researchers aren’t being careful about how the letter and the spirit of the question can come apart and result in false negatives. In the one section of the FRI studies linked above I took a careful look at, the ARA section, I found that there was still huge ambiguity in how the question is operationalized—this could explain up to an OOM of disagreement in probabilities.
Some Metaculus links: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/578/human-extinction-by-2100/ Admittedly in this question the number is 1%, but compare to the below. Also note that the forecasts date back to as old as 2018. https://www.metaculus.com/questions/17735/conditional-human-extinction-by-2100/ https://www.metaculus.com/questions/9062/time-from-weak-agi-to-superintelligence/ (compare this to the weak AGI timeline and other questions)