I mostly agree with the things in that link, but I also want to say that at the end of the day, I think it’s fine and healthy in general for someone to describe their beliefs in terms of a probability distribution even when they have very little to go on. So in this particular case, if someone says “I think AGI will probably (>80%) come in the next 10 years”, I would say “my own beliefs are different from that”, but I would not describe that person as “overconfident”, per se. It’s not like there’s a default timeline probability distribution, and this default is mostly >10 years, and you need great personal confidence & swagger to overrule that default. There is no default! The link agrees that the arguments for long timelines are just as sketchy as the arguments for short timelines. It’s still appropriate for people to do the best they can to form probabilistic beliefs.
I mostly agree with the things in that link, but I also want to say that at the end of the day, I think it’s fine and healthy in general for someone to describe their beliefs in terms of a probability distribution even when they have very little to go on. So in this particular case, if someone says “I think AGI will probably (>80%) come in the next 10 years”, I would say “my own beliefs are different from that”, but I would not describe that person as “overconfident”, per se. It’s not like there’s a default timeline probability distribution, and this default is mostly >10 years, and you need great personal confidence & swagger to overrule that default. There is no default! The link agrees that the arguments for long timelines are just as sketchy as the arguments for short timelines. It’s still appropriate for people to do the best they can to form probabilistic beliefs.