Okay, that might be useful. (For a mainstream perspective on this I have agreement with, see The Scams Are Winning).
The argument for most of the post is that there are active distortionary pressures towards short timelines. I mentioned the tech survey in the conclusion to indicate that the distortionary pressures aren’t some niche interest, they’re having big effects on the world.
Will discuss later in this comment.
By “concrete criticisms” I mean the Twitter replies. I’m studying the implicit assumptions behind these criticisms to see what it says about attitudes in the AI field.
I feel like you could have written an equally compelling essay “proving” bias in favor of long timelines, of Democrats, of Republicans, or of almost anything; if you feel like you couldn’t, I feel like the post didn’t explain why you felt that way.
I think this is the main thrust of your criticism, and also the main thrust of point 3. I do think lots of things are scams, and I could have written about other things instead, but I wrote about short timelines, because I can’t talk about everything in one essay, and this one seems important.
I couldn’t have written an equally compelling essay on biases in favor of long timelines without lying, I think, or even with lying while trying to maintain plausibility. (Note also, it seems useful for there to be essays on the Democrat party’s marketing strategy that don’t also talk about the Republican party’s marketing strategy)
Courts don’t work by the judge saying “well, you know, you could argue for anything, so what’s the point in having people present cases for one side or the other?” The point is that some cases end up stronger than other cases. I can’t prove that there isn’t an equally strong case that there’s bias in favor of long timelines, because that would be proving a negative. (Even if I did, that would be a case of “sometimes there’s bias in favor of X, sometimes against X, it depends on the situation/person/etc”; the newly discovered distortionary pressures don’t negate the fact that the previously discovered ones exist)
I agree that it’s difficult (practically impossible) to engage with a criticism of the form “I don’t find your examples compelling”, because such a criticism is in some sense opaque: there’s very little you can do with the information provided, except possibly add more examples (which is time-consuming, and also might not even work if the additional examples you choose happen to be “uncompelling” in the same way as your original examples).
However, there is a deeper point to be made here: presumably you yourself only arrived at your position after some amount of consideration. The fact that others appear to find your arguments (including any examples you used) uncompelling, then, usually indicates one of two things:
You have not successfully expressed the full chain of reasoning that led you to originally adopt your conclusion (owing perhaps to constraints on time, effort, issues with legibility, or strategic concerns). In this case, you should be unsurprised at the fact that other people don’t appear to be convinced by your post, since your post does not present the same arguments/evidence that convinced you yourself to believe your position.
You do, in fact, find the raw examples in your post persuasive. This would then indicate that any disagreement between you and your readers is due to differing priors, i.e. evidence that you would consider sufficient to convince yourself of something, does not likewise convince others. Ideally, this fact should cause you to update in favor of the possibility that you are mistaken, at least if you believe that your interlocutors are being rational and intellectually honest.
I don’t know which of these two possibilities it actually is, but it may be worth keeping this in mind if you make a post that a bunch of people seem to disagree with.
Note also, it seems useful for there to be essays on the Democrat party’s marketing strategy that don’t also talk about the Republican party’s marketing strategy
Minor, unconfident, point: I’m not sure that this is true. It seems like it would result in people mostly fallacy-fallacy-ing the other side, each with their own “look how manipulative the other guys are” essays. If the target is thoughtful people trying to figure things out, they’ll want to hear about both sides, no?
Courts don’t work by the judge saying “well, you know, you could argue for anything, so what’s the point in having people present cases for one side or the other?” The point is that some cases end up stronger than other cases.
I think courts spend a fair bit of effort not just in evaluating strength of case, but standing and impact of the case. not “what else could you argue?”, but “why does this complaint matter, to whom?”
IMO, you’re absolutely right that there’s lots of pressures to make unrealistically short predictions for advances, and this causes a lot of punditry, and academia and industry, to … what? It’s annoying, but who is harmed and who has the ability to improve things?
Personally, I think timeline for AGI is a poorly-defined prediction—the big question is what capabilities satisfy the “AGI” definition. I think we WILL see more and more impressive performance in aspects of problem-solving and prediction that would have been classified as “intelligence” 50 years ago, but that we probably won’t credit with consciousness or generality.
Okay, that might be useful. (For a mainstream perspective on this I have agreement with, see The Scams Are Winning).
The argument for most of the post is that there are active distortionary pressures towards short timelines. I mentioned the tech survey in the conclusion to indicate that the distortionary pressures aren’t some niche interest, they’re having big effects on the world.
Will discuss later in this comment.
By “concrete criticisms” I mean the Twitter replies. I’m studying the implicit assumptions behind these criticisms to see what it says about attitudes in the AI field.
I think this is the main thrust of your criticism, and also the main thrust of point 3. I do think lots of things are scams, and I could have written about other things instead, but I wrote about short timelines, because I can’t talk about everything in one essay, and this one seems important.
I couldn’t have written an equally compelling essay on biases in favor of long timelines without lying, I think, or even with lying while trying to maintain plausibility. (Note also, it seems useful for there to be essays on the Democrat party’s marketing strategy that don’t also talk about the Republican party’s marketing strategy)
Courts don’t work by the judge saying “well, you know, you could argue for anything, so what’s the point in having people present cases for one side or the other?” The point is that some cases end up stronger than other cases. I can’t prove that there isn’t an equally strong case that there’s bias in favor of long timelines, because that would be proving a negative. (Even if I did, that would be a case of “sometimes there’s bias in favor of X, sometimes against X, it depends on the situation/person/etc”; the newly discovered distortionary pressures don’t negate the fact that the previously discovered ones exist)
I agree that it’s difficult (practically impossible) to engage with a criticism of the form “I don’t find your examples compelling”, because such a criticism is in some sense opaque: there’s very little you can do with the information provided, except possibly add more examples (which is time-consuming, and also might not even work if the additional examples you choose happen to be “uncompelling” in the same way as your original examples).
However, there is a deeper point to be made here: presumably you yourself only arrived at your position after some amount of consideration. The fact that others appear to find your arguments (including any examples you used) uncompelling, then, usually indicates one of two things:
You have not successfully expressed the full chain of reasoning that led you to originally adopt your conclusion (owing perhaps to constraints on time, effort, issues with legibility, or strategic concerns). In this case, you should be unsurprised at the fact that other people don’t appear to be convinced by your post, since your post does not present the same arguments/evidence that convinced you yourself to believe your position.
You do, in fact, find the raw examples in your post persuasive. This would then indicate that any disagreement between you and your readers is due to differing priors, i.e. evidence that you would consider sufficient to convince yourself of something, does not likewise convince others. Ideally, this fact should cause you to update in favor of the possibility that you are mistaken, at least if you believe that your interlocutors are being rational and intellectually honest.
I don’t know which of these two possibilities it actually is, but it may be worth keeping this in mind if you make a post that a bunch of people seem to disagree with.
Scott’s post explaining his opinion is here, and is called ‘Against Lie Inflation’.
Minor, unconfident, point: I’m not sure that this is true. It seems like it would result in people mostly fallacy-fallacy-ing the other side, each with their own “look how manipulative the other guys are” essays. If the target is thoughtful people trying to figure things out, they’ll want to hear about both sides, no?
I think courts spend a fair bit of effort not just in evaluating strength of case, but standing and impact of the case. not “what else could you argue?”, but “why does this complaint matter, to whom?”
IMO, you’re absolutely right that there’s lots of pressures to make unrealistically short predictions for advances, and this causes a lot of punditry, and academia and industry, to … what? It’s annoying, but who is harmed and who has the ability to improve things?
Personally, I think timeline for AGI is a poorly-defined prediction—the big question is what capabilities satisfy the “AGI” definition. I think we WILL see more and more impressive performance in aspects of problem-solving and prediction that would have been classified as “intelligence” 50 years ago, but that we probably won’t credit with consciousness or generality.
Then perhaps you should start here.