Sure, but then the other side of the analogy doesn’t make sense, right? The context was: Eliezer was talking in general terms about the difficulty of the AGI x-risk problem and whether it’s likely to be solved. (As I understand it.)
[Needless to say, I’m just making a narrow point that it’s a bad analogy. I’m not arguing that p(doom) is high or low, I’m not saying this is an important & illustrative mistake (talking on the fly is hard!), etc.]
So I definitely think that’s something weirdly unspoken about the argument; I would characterize it as Eliezer saying “suppose I’m right and they’re wrong; all this requires is things to be harder than people think, which is usual. Suppose instead that I’m wrong and they’re right; this requires things to be easier than people think, which is unusual.” But the equation of “people” and “Eliezer” is sort of strange; as Quintin notes, it isn’t that unusual for outside observers to overestimate difficulty, and so I wish he had centrally addressed the the reference class tennis game; is the expertise “getting AI systems to be capable” or “getting AI systems to do what you want”?
Sure, but then the other side of the analogy doesn’t make sense, right? The context was: Eliezer was talking in general terms about the difficulty of the AGI x-risk problem and whether it’s likely to be solved. (As I understand it.)
[Needless to say, I’m just making a narrow point that it’s a bad analogy. I’m not arguing that p(doom) is high or low, I’m not saying this is an important & illustrative mistake (talking on the fly is hard!), etc.]
So I definitely think that’s something weirdly unspoken about the argument; I would characterize it as Eliezer saying “suppose I’m right and they’re wrong; all this requires is things to be harder than people think, which is usual. Suppose instead that I’m wrong and they’re right; this requires things to be easier than people think, which is unusual.” But the equation of “people” and “Eliezer” is sort of strange; as Quintin notes, it isn’t that unusual for outside observers to overestimate difficulty, and so I wish he had centrally addressed the the reference class tennis game; is the expertise “getting AI systems to be capable” or “getting AI systems to do what you want”?