(Crying wolf isn’t really a thing here; the societal impact of these capabilities is undeniable and you will not lose credibility even if 3 years from now these systems haven’t yet FOOMed, because the big changes will be obvious and you’ll have predicted that right.)
This is wrong. Crying wolf is always a thing.
You’ve declared that you’ll turn out “obviously” right about “the big changes”, thus justifying whatever alarm-sounding. But saying these innovations will have societal impacts is very different from a 30% chance of catastrophe. Lots of things have “societal impact”.
You haven’t mentioned any operationalized events to even be able to make it “obvious” whether you were wrong. Whatever happens, in a few years you’ll rationalize you were “basically correct” or whatever. You’ll have baseball fields worth of wiggle room. Though there are ways you could make this prediction meaningful.
In the vast majority of worlds, nothing catastrophic happens anytime soon. Those are worlds where it’s indeed plausible to blow capital or reputation on something that turned out to be not that bad. I.e. “crying wolf” is indeed a thing.
I give <1% chance we are currently “in a fast takeoff”, but that forecast doesn’t mean anything until we have something unambiguous to score anyway. For me the high upvote count is a downward update on the expected competence of the LW audience.
I give <1% chance we are currently “in a fast takeoff”, but that forecast doesn’t mean anything until we have something unambiguous to score anyway. For me the high upvote count is a downward update on the expected competence of the LW audience.
You should remember that the post has 117 karma and 124 votes, which means it’s highly controversial for this forum. The average tends to be something like 2:1 as a ratio, given a mix of high-karma people strong upvoting and regular upvoting.
Reflecting on this and other comments, I decided to edit the original post to retract the call for a “fire alarm”.
(Not because I agree with your probabilities, I still don’t, but because I agree with your criticism on my lack of operationalization, and general vagueness about possible negative consequences.)
This is wrong. Crying wolf is always a thing.
You’ve declared that you’ll turn out “obviously” right about “the big changes”, thus justifying whatever alarm-sounding. But saying these innovations will have societal impacts is very different from a 30% chance of catastrophe. Lots of things have “societal impact”.
You haven’t mentioned any operationalized events to even be able to make it “obvious” whether you were wrong. Whatever happens, in a few years you’ll rationalize you were “basically correct” or whatever. You’ll have baseball fields worth of wiggle room. Though there are ways you could make this prediction meaningful.
In the vast majority of worlds, nothing catastrophic happens anytime soon. Those are worlds where it’s indeed plausible to blow capital or reputation on something that turned out to be not that bad. I.e. “crying wolf” is indeed a thing.
I give <1% chance we are currently “in a fast takeoff”, but that forecast doesn’t mean anything until we have something unambiguous to score anyway. For me the high upvote count is a downward update on the expected competence of the LW audience.
You should remember that the post has 117 karma and 124 votes, which means it’s highly controversial for this forum. The average tends to be something like 2:1 as a ratio, given a mix of high-karma people strong upvoting and regular upvoting.
Reflecting on this and other comments, I decided to edit the original post to retract the call for a “fire alarm”.
(Not because I agree with your probabilities, I still don’t, but because I agree with your criticism on my lack of operationalization, and general vagueness about possible negative consequences.)
I have switched to upvoted! EDIT: Ah I see you are open to one of the bet offers, great!