I originally wrote this post because I saw quite a few of what I perceived mistakes in the reasoning of rationalists around predicting trends and innovation.
People confusing s-curves with exponentinal growth.
People confusing evolution and diffusion curves, and assuming they were the same thing.
People making basic mistakes about how technologies would likely evolve, because they didn’t understand historical evolutionary patterns.
At the time, I thought that simply making a post explaining the models they were missing would create a resource to help correct these errors.
I now think this was a bit naive. New models don’t automatically propagate to old believes, and I believe this post would be better served by giving specific examples of where reasoning can be confused or incomplete without these models.
Indeed, the one part of the post where I do this is in fact the part that had the most impact.
I agree with Zvi that as the post stands doesn’t do this well enough to merit inclusion in the final collection, but that a version of the post that does could in fact be useful.
I also agree with Hamnox that there needs to be more clear resources, and the image links need to be fixed. I disagree about the use of evolution, which just means the study of change over time and is used in scientific disciplines like Cosmology. Eliezer is just wrong here.
Update: Made these changes
I originally wrote this post because I saw quite a few of what I perceived mistakes in the reasoning of rationalists around predicting trends and innovation.
People confusing s-curves with exponentinal growth.
People confusing evolution and diffusion curves, and assuming they were the same thing.
People making basic mistakes about how technologies would likely evolve, because they didn’t understand historical evolutionary patterns.
At the time, I thought that simply making a post explaining the models they were missing would create a resource to help correct these errors.
I now think this was a bit naive. New models don’t automatically propagate to old believes, and I believe this post would be better served by giving specific examples of where reasoning can be confused or incomplete without these models.
Indeed, the one part of the post where I do this is in fact the part that had the most impact.
I agree with Zvi that as the post stands doesn’t do this well enough to merit inclusion in the final collection, but that a version of the post that does could in fact be useful.
I also agree with Hamnox that there needs to be more clear resources, and the image links need to be fixed. I disagree about the use of evolution, which just means the study of change over time and is used in scientific disciplines like Cosmology. Eliezer is just wrong here.
Oh man I liked this post but I bet if you laid out the concrete examples of where this goes wrong, I’d learn something useful.
I do think this is a great standalone post, which has indeed affected my thinking at least somewhat.