I don’t think my meme image is a good argument against all arguments that stuff will go up. But I don’t think it’s “straw manning the argument”. The argument given is often pretty much literally just “look, it’s been going up”, maybe coupled with some mumbling about how “people are working on the data problem something something self-play something something synthetic data”.
But progress continuing in a roughly linear fashion between now and 2027 seems, to me, totally “strikingly plauisble.”
Do you think my image disagrees with that? Look again.
Sorry, I’m kinda lumping your meme in with a more general line of criticism I’ve seen that casts doubt on the whole idea of extrapolating an exponential trend, on account of the fact that we should eventually expect diminishing returns. But such extrapolation can still be quite informative, especially in the short term! If you had done it in 2020 to make guesses about where we’d end up in 2024, it would have served you well.
The sense in which it’s straw-manning, in my mind, is that even the trend-extrapolaters admit that we can expect diminishing returns eventually. The question is where exactly we are on the curve, and that much is very uncertain. Given this, assuming the past rate of growth will hold constant for three more years isn’t such a bad strategy (especially if you can tell plausible stories about how we’ll e.g. get enough power to support the next 3 OOMs).
It’s true — we might run into issues with data — but we also might solve those issues. And I don’t think this is just mumbling and hand waving. My best guess is that there are real, promising efforts going on to solve this within labs, but we shouldn’t expect to hear them in convincing detail because they will be fiercely guarded as a point of comparative advantage over other companies hitting the wall, hence why it just feels like mumbling from the outside.
I’m not sure what you want me to see by looking at your image again. Is it about the position of 2027 on the X-axis of the graph from Leopold’s essay? If so, yeah, I assumed that placement wasn’t rigorous or intentional and the goal of the meme was to suggest that extrapolating the trend in a linear fashion through 2027 was naive.
I don’t think my meme image is a good argument against all arguments that stuff will go up. But I don’t think it’s “straw manning the argument”. The argument given is often pretty much literally just “look, it’s been going up”, maybe coupled with some mumbling about how “people are working on the data problem something something self-play something something synthetic data”.
Do you think my image disagrees with that? Look again.
Sorry, I’m kinda lumping your meme in with a more general line of criticism I’ve seen that casts doubt on the whole idea of extrapolating an exponential trend, on account of the fact that we should eventually expect diminishing returns. But such extrapolation can still be quite informative, especially in the short term! If you had done it in 2020 to make guesses about where we’d end up in 2024, it would have served you well.
The sense in which it’s straw-manning, in my mind, is that even the trend-extrapolaters admit that we can expect diminishing returns eventually. The question is where exactly we are on the curve, and that much is very uncertain. Given this, assuming the past rate of growth will hold constant for three more years isn’t such a bad strategy (especially if you can tell plausible stories about how we’ll e.g. get enough power to support the next 3 OOMs).
It’s true — we might run into issues with data — but we also might solve those issues. And I don’t think this is just mumbling and hand waving. My best guess is that there are real, promising efforts going on to solve this within labs, but we shouldn’t expect to hear them in convincing detail because they will be fiercely guarded as a point of comparative advantage over other companies hitting the wall, hence why it just feels like mumbling from the outside.
I’m not sure what you want me to see by looking at your image again. Is it about the position of 2027 on the X-axis of the graph from Leopold’s essay? If so, yeah, I assumed that placement wasn’t rigorous or intentional and the goal of the meme was to suggest that extrapolating the trend in a linear fashion through 2027 was naive.