Those advocating for more speculative interventions point to calculations suggesting that the expected value of their interventions is extremely large. What implications, if any, does the question “How much do you believe your results?” have for this debate?
I think it highlights the importance of plausibility arguments. If you think the underlying Quality distribution is gaussian, any claim of huge impact is going to be hard to stomach. What plausibility arguments do is say “hey, there are some really powerful interventions on the technological horizon, and so here’s the evidence that the underlying Quality distribution has some really impactful interventions in it.” They’re the strong evidence for broad facts that we might take as background knowledge, but that serve to underpin a lot of the later reasoning we might try to do.
I think it highlights the importance of plausibility arguments. If you think the underlying Quality distribution is gaussian, any claim of huge impact is going to be hard to stomach. What plausibility arguments do is say “hey, there are some really powerful interventions on the technological horizon, and so here’s the evidence that the underlying Quality distribution has some really impactful interventions in it.” They’re the strong evidence for broad facts that we might take as background knowledge, but that serve to underpin a lot of the later reasoning we might try to do.