I might have missed mention of this somewhere, but I think that some kind of analysis that provides some context on “what did the skeptics at the time say—especially for forecasts that resolved incorrectly vs. correctly” would be quite nice: I think it’s potentially helpful to get a model of “(how often/when) were skeptics on the right side of the forecast, and were they accurate for reasons that ended up proving true?” Additionally, some case studies of examples to determine “were they justified for thinking the way they did” while excluding hindsight bias might be difficult, but similarly helpful.
Suppose hypothetically that the findings were something like “When futurists were on the right side of 50% but many of their contemporaries were skeptical at the time, it often was the case that the skepticism was not very engaged/persuasive/grounded (e.g., it was largely based on initial objections to which the futurists provided responses that went unaddressed by the skeptics; making assumptions that were verifiably wrong given available information at the time).” It seems quite improbable that you would get such a neat finding, but if the findings did vaguely resemble this—or if there were at least some not-misrepresentative anecdotes to this effect—then that could be a useful thing to highlight when discussing skepticism towards AGI predictions.
I might have missed mention of this somewhere, but I think that some kind of analysis that provides some context on “what did the skeptics at the time say—especially for forecasts that resolved incorrectly vs. correctly” would be quite nice: I think it’s potentially helpful to get a model of “(how often/when) were skeptics on the right side of the forecast, and were they accurate for reasons that ended up proving true?” Additionally, some case studies of examples to determine “were they justified for thinking the way they did” while excluding hindsight bias might be difficult, but similarly helpful.
Suppose hypothetically that the findings were something like “When futurists were on the right side of 50% but many of their contemporaries were skeptical at the time, it often was the case that the skepticism was not very engaged/persuasive/grounded (e.g., it was largely based on initial objections to which the futurists provided responses that went unaddressed by the skeptics; making assumptions that were verifiably wrong given available information at the time).” It seems quite improbable that you would get such a neat finding, but if the findings did vaguely resemble this—or if there were at least some not-misrepresentative anecdotes to this effect—then that could be a useful thing to highlight when discussing skepticism towards AGI predictions.