This post suggests that when surveying researchers about the future impact of their technology, we should specifically ask them about their beliefs about what actions other people will take, and what they personally are going to do, rather than just predicting total impact. (For example, we could ask how many people will invest in safety.) Then, by aggregating across survey respondents, we can see whether or not the researchers beliefs about what others will do match the empirical distribution of what researchers are planning to do. This can help mitigate the effect where everyone thinks that everyone else will deal with a problem, and the effect where everyone tries to solve a problem because they all think no one else is planning to solve it. Critch has offered to provide suggestions on including this methodology in any upcoming surveys; see the post for details.
Planned opinion:
This is a cool idea, and seems worth doing to me. I especially like that the survey would simply reveal problems by collecting two sources of information from people and checking their consistency with each other: there isn’t any particular argument being made; you are simply showing inconsistency in people’s own beliefs to them, if and only if such inconsistency exists. In practice, I’m sure there will be complications—for example, perhaps the set of researchers taking the survey is different from the set of “others” whose actions and beliefs they are predicting—but it still seems worth at least trying out.
Planned summary:
This post suggests that when surveying researchers about the future impact of their technology, we should specifically ask them about their beliefs about what actions other people will take, and what they personally are going to do, rather than just predicting total impact. (For example, we could ask how many people will invest in safety.) Then, by aggregating across survey respondents, we can see whether or not the researchers beliefs about what others will do match the empirical distribution of what researchers are planning to do. This can help mitigate the effect where everyone thinks that everyone else will deal with a problem, and the effect where everyone tries to solve a problem because they all think no one else is planning to solve it. Critch has offered to provide suggestions on including this methodology in any upcoming surveys; see the post for details.
Planned opinion:
This is a cool idea, and seems worth doing to me. I especially like that the survey would simply reveal problems by collecting two sources of information from people and checking their consistency with each other: there isn’t any particular argument being made; you are simply showing inconsistency in people’s own beliefs to them, if and only if such inconsistency exists. In practice, I’m sure there will be complications—for example, perhaps the set of researchers taking the survey is different from the set of “others” whose actions and beliefs they are predicting—but it still seems worth at least trying out.