This whole debate looks like a red herring to me. The entire distinction makes no sense—all views are outside views. Our only knowledge of the future comes from knowledge of regularities. So all arguments are arguments from typicality. Some of that knowledge comes from surveys of how long it takes someone to finish a project. Some comes from experimental science. Some of that knowledge comes from repeated personal experience—say completing lots of projects on time. Some of it is innate, driven into us though generations of evolution. But all of it is outside view. The so-called “inside view” arguments are just a lot harder to express by pointing to a single reference class. We believe Barack Obama is President because usually widely held beliefs about who holds important government positions is accurate, because the media doesn’t lie about such things, because the people who get referred to as “President x” usually are president etc.
Those who are saying they are taking the outside view are just ignoring some of the relevant regularities for these big issues. Now there might be reason to disregard some of those regularities. For example, it seems clear that people are too biased to estimate how long it will take them to complete certain kinds of tasks. In these cases then, it makes sense to disregard their self-estimations. It turns out, in other words, that self-estimation isn’t a very reliable regularity. There are other biases that will cause us to think something is reliable evidence when it isn’t (or isn’t once better evidence is considered). But the right approach is to identify those biases, not just assume some data isn’t good evidence because it is part of this mysterious “inside view”.
If AGI researchers are all suffering from a bias that leads them to conclude AGI will happen when they shouldn’t I’m sure they would appreciate knowing that. If this is the case, someone should describe the bias and point to examples. But you can’t just ignore their arguments that AGI will happen and just claim higher ground with “the outside view”. Every view is an outside view, the question is which views are biased.
This whole debate looks like a red herring to me. The entire distinction makes no sense—all views are outside views. Our only knowledge of the future comes from knowledge of regularities. So all arguments are arguments from typicality. Some of that knowledge comes from surveys of how long it takes someone to finish a project. Some comes from experimental science. Some of that knowledge comes from repeated personal experience—say completing lots of projects on time. Some of it is innate, driven into us though generations of evolution. But all of it is outside view. The so-called “inside view” arguments are just a lot harder to express by pointing to a single reference class. We believe Barack Obama is President because usually widely held beliefs about who holds important government positions is accurate, because the media doesn’t lie about such things, because the people who get referred to as “President x” usually are president etc.
Those who are saying they are taking the outside view are just ignoring some of the relevant regularities for these big issues. Now there might be reason to disregard some of those regularities. For example, it seems clear that people are too biased to estimate how long it will take them to complete certain kinds of tasks. In these cases then, it makes sense to disregard their self-estimations. It turns out, in other words, that self-estimation isn’t a very reliable regularity. There are other biases that will cause us to think something is reliable evidence when it isn’t (or isn’t once better evidence is considered). But the right approach is to identify those biases, not just assume some data isn’t good evidence because it is part of this mysterious “inside view”.
If AGI researchers are all suffering from a bias that leads them to conclude AGI will happen when they shouldn’t I’m sure they would appreciate knowing that. If this is the case, someone should describe the bias and point to examples. But you can’t just ignore their arguments that AGI will happen and just claim higher ground with “the outside view”. Every view is an outside view, the question is which views are biased.