(Even this kind of “I don’t know” still has to correspond to some probability distribution
over decades, just not a tight distribution. I’m currently trying to sort out with Carl
Shulman why my median is more like 2035 and his median is more like 2080. Neither
of us thinks we can time it down to the decade—we have very broad credible intervals
in both cases—but the discrepancy between our “I don’t knows” is too large to ignore.)
Hm. Thanks for pointing that out. Maybe I should remove the specific dates from there and just say we were 45 years apart. I think in a lot of ways trying to time the intelligence explosion is a huge distraction. An important probability distribution, but still a huge distraction.
Well, you mentioned on occasion that this date affects your resource allocation between CFAR and MIRI, so it might be a worthwhile exercise to make the calculation explicit and subject to scrutiny, if not in the report, then some place else.
Maybe I misunderstood this passage:
Hm. Thanks for pointing that out. Maybe I should remove the specific dates from there and just say we were 45 years apart. I think in a lot of ways trying to time the intelligence explosion is a huge distraction. An important probability distribution, but still a huge distraction.
Well, you mentioned on occasion that this date affects your resource allocation between CFAR and MIRI, so it might be a worthwhile exercise to make the calculation explicit and subject to scrutiny, if not in the report, then some place else.
Fair point. We’re still struggling to express things verbally, but yeah.