I think “futurism with good epistemics” is pretty hard, and pretty important. The LessWrong zeitgeist is sort of “Post Kurzweil” – his predictions aren’t the ones that we’ll personally be graded on. But, I think the act of methodically looking over his predictions helps us orient on the predictions we’re making.
I think a) it offers a cautionary tale of mistakes we might be making, and b) I think the act of having a strong tradition of evaluating long-past predictions (hopefully?) helps ward off bullshit. (i.e. many pundits make predictions which skew towards ‘locally sound exciting and impressive’ because they don’t expect to be called on it later)
It’s also interesting to note how much disagreement there was over some predictions.
One question I came away with:
It’s been suggested that Kurzweil’s predictions for 2009 are mostly correct in 2019.
Is this well established? Is there a previous writeup that argues this, or just a general feel? I’d be interested in applying the same methology to the old 2009 predictions and check if they’re true.
Curated.
I think “futurism with good epistemics” is pretty hard, and pretty important. The LessWrong zeitgeist is sort of “Post Kurzweil” – his predictions aren’t the ones that we’ll personally be graded on. But, I think the act of methodically looking over his predictions helps us orient on the predictions we’re making.
I think a) it offers a cautionary tale of mistakes we might be making, and b) I think the act of having a strong tradition of evaluating long-past predictions (hopefully?) helps ward off bullshit. (i.e. many pundits make predictions which skew towards ‘locally sound exciting and impressive’ because they don’t expect to be called on it later)
It’s also interesting to note how much disagreement there was over some predictions.
One question I came away with:
Is this well established? Is there a previous writeup that argues this, or just a general feel? I’d be interested in applying the same methology to the old 2009 predictions and check if they’re true.
https://www.futuretimeline.net/forum/topic/17903-kurzweils-2009-is-our-2019/ , forwarded to me by Daniel Kokotajlo (I added a link in the post as well).
This link now goes to a “page not found” I’m afraid