I feel like a big crux is whether Platt’s Law is true:
Eliezer: I mean, in fact, part of my actual sense of indignation at this whole affair, is the way that Platt’s law of strong AI forecasts—which was in the 1980s generalizing “thirty years” as the time that ends up sounding “reasonable” to would-be forecasters—is still exactly in effect for what ends up sounding “reasonable” to would-be futurists, in fricking 2020 while the air is filling up with AI smoke in the silence of nonexistent fire alarms.
Didn’t AI Impacts look into this a while back? See e.g. this dataset. Below is one of the graphs:
Wow, I’d forgotten about that prediction dataset! It seems like there’s only even semi-decent data since 1994, but since then there does seem to be a plausible ~35-year median in the recorded points (even though, or perhaps because, the sampled distribution has been changing over time).
Strongly disagree with this, to the extent that I think this is probably the least cruxy topic discussed in this post, and thus the comment is as wrong as is physically possible.
Remove Platt’s law, and none of the actual arguments and meta-discussions changes. It’s clearly a case of Yudkowsky going for the snappy “hey, see like even your new-and-smarter report makes exactly the same estimation predicted by a random psychological law” + his own frustration with the law still applying despite expected progress.
But once again, if Platt’s law was so wrong that there was never in the history of the universe a single instance of people predicting strong AI and/or AGI in 30 years, this would have no influence whatsoever on the arguments in this post IMO.
Strongly disagree with this, to the extent that I think this is probably the least cruxy topic discussed in this post, and thus the comment is as wrong as is physically possible.
Hahaha ok, interesting! If you are right I’ll take some pride in having achieved that distinction. ;)
I interpreted Yudkowsky as claiming that Ajeya’s model had enough free parameters that it could be made to predict a wide range of things, and that what was actually driving the 30-year prediction was a bunch of implicit biases rather than reality. Platt’s Law is evidence for this claim. If it were false and e.g. the typical timelines forecast was only 10 years out, or 60, then we would have less reason to think that implicit biases were driving Ajeya’s choice of parameters. Of course, Yudkowsky also made other arguments besides this one… but this one seemed to be there, and it seemed fairly important to me.
It’s entirely possible I am misconstruing Yudkowsky’s argument… you did recently do a reconstruction, so you probably understand it better than me. Care to elaborate?
I do think you are misconstruing Yudkowsky’s argument. I’m going to give evidence (all of which are relatively strong IMO) in order of “ease of checkability”. So I’ll start with something anyone can check in a couple of minutes, and close by the more general interpretation that requires rereading the post in details.
Evidence 1: Yudkowsky flags Simulated-Eliezer as talking smack in the part you’re mentioning
If I follow you correctly, your interpretation mostly comes from this part:
OpenPhil: We did already consider that and try to take it into account: our model already includes a parameter for how algorithmic progress reduces hardware requirements. It’s not easy to graph as exactly as Moore’s Law, as you say, but our best-guess estimate is that compute costs halve every 2-3 years.
Eliezer: Oh, nice. I was wondering what sort of tunable underdetermined parameters enabled your model to nail the psychologically overdetermined final figure of ’30 years’ so exactly.
OpenPhil: Eliezer.
Note that this is one of the two times in this dialogue where Simulated-OpenPhil calls out Simulated-Eliezer. But remember that this whole dialogue was written by Yudkowsky! So he is flagging himself that this particular answer is a quip. Simulated-Eliezer doesn’t reexplain it as he does most of his insulting points to Humbali; instead Simulated-Eliezer goes for a completely different explanation in the next answer.
Evidence 2: Platt’s law is barely mentioned in the whole dialogue
“Platt” is used 6-times in the 20k words piece. “30 years” is used 8 times (basically at the same place where “Platt” is used”).
Evidence 3: Humbali spends far more time discussing and justifying the “30 years” time than Simulated-OpenPhil. And Humbali is the strawman character, whereas Simulated-OpenPhil actually tries to discuss and to understand what Simulated Eliezer is saying.
Evidence 4: There is an alternative interpretation that takes into account the full text and doesn’t use Platt’s law at all: see this comment on your other thread for my current best version of that explanation.
Evidence 5: Yudkowsky’s whole criticism relying on a purely empirical and superficial similarity goes contrary to everything that I extracted from his writing in my recent post, and also to all the time he spends here discussing deep knowledge and the need for an underlying model.
So my opinion is that Platt’s law is completely superfluous here, and is present here only because it gives a way of pointing to the ridiculousness of some estimates, and because to Yudkowsky it probably means that people are not even making interesting new mistakes but just the same mistakes over and over again. I think discussing it in this post doesn’t add much, and weakens the post significantly as it allows reading like yours Daniel, missing the actual point.
I feel like a big crux is whether Platt’s Law is true:
Didn’t AI Impacts look into this a while back? See e.g. this dataset. Below is one of the graphs:
It may help to visualize this graph with the line for Platt’s Law drawn in.
Overall I find the law to be pretty much empirically validated, at least by the standards I’d expect from a half in jest Law of Prediction.
Wow, I’d forgotten about that prediction dataset! It seems like there’s only even semi-decent data since 1994, but since then there does seem to be a plausible ~35-year median in the recorded points (even though, or perhaps because, the sampled distribution has been changing over time).
Strongly disagree with this, to the extent that I think this is probably the least cruxy topic discussed in this post, and thus the comment is as wrong as is physically possible.
Remove Platt’s law, and none of the actual arguments and meta-discussions changes. It’s clearly a case of Yudkowsky going for the snappy “hey, see like even your new-and-smarter report makes exactly the same estimation predicted by a random psychological law” + his own frustration with the law still applying despite expected progress.
But once again, if Platt’s law was so wrong that there was never in the history of the universe a single instance of people predicting strong AI and/or AGI in 30 years, this would have no influence whatsoever on the arguments in this post IMO.
Hahaha ok, interesting! If you are right I’ll take some pride in having achieved that distinction. ;)
I interpreted Yudkowsky as claiming that Ajeya’s model had enough free parameters that it could be made to predict a wide range of things, and that what was actually driving the 30-year prediction was a bunch of implicit biases rather than reality. Platt’s Law is evidence for this claim. If it were false and e.g. the typical timelines forecast was only 10 years out, or 60, then we would have less reason to think that implicit biases were driving Ajeya’s choice of parameters. Of course, Yudkowsky also made other arguments besides this one… but this one seemed to be there, and it seemed fairly important to me.
It’s entirely possible I am misconstruing Yudkowsky’s argument… you did recently do a reconstruction, so you probably understand it better than me. Care to elaborate?
I do think you are misconstruing Yudkowsky’s argument. I’m going to give evidence (all of which are relatively strong IMO) in order of “ease of checkability”. So I’ll start with something anyone can check in a couple of minutes, and close by the more general interpretation that requires rereading the post in details.
Evidence 1: Yudkowsky flags Simulated-Eliezer as talking smack in the part you’re mentioning
If I follow you correctly, your interpretation mostly comes from this part:
Note that this is one of the two times in this dialogue where Simulated-OpenPhil calls out Simulated-Eliezer. But remember that this whole dialogue was written by Yudkowsky! So he is flagging himself that this particular answer is a quip. Simulated-Eliezer doesn’t reexplain it as he does most of his insulting points to Humbali; instead Simulated-Eliezer goes for a completely different explanation in the next answer.
Evidence 2: Platt’s law is barely mentioned in the whole dialogue
“Platt” is used 6-times in the 20k words piece. “30 years” is used 8 times (basically at the same place where “Platt” is used”).
Evidence 3: Humbali spends far more time discussing and justifying the “30 years” time than Simulated-OpenPhil. And Humbali is the strawman character, whereas Simulated-OpenPhil actually tries to discuss and to understand what Simulated Eliezer is saying.
Evidence 4: There is an alternative interpretation that takes into account the full text and doesn’t use Platt’s law at all: see this comment on your other thread for my current best version of that explanation.
Evidence 5: Yudkowsky’s whole criticism relying on a purely empirical and superficial similarity goes contrary to everything that I extracted from his writing in my recent post, and also to all the time he spends here discussing deep knowledge and the need for an underlying model.
So my opinion is that Platt’s law is completely superfluous here, and is present here only because it gives a way of pointing to the ridiculousness of some estimates, and because to Yudkowsky it probably means that people are not even making interesting new mistakes but just the same mistakes over and over again. I think discussing it in this post doesn’t add much, and weakens the post significantly as it allows reading like yours Daniel, missing the actual point.