I don’t really trust Robin and Eliezer to be well-calibrated about what they don’t know. One way to become a public figure is to make interesting predictions, and both have used this strategy. So polling public-figure-ish smart people as opposed to smart people in general will tend to get us a more confidently expressed and interesting-for-the-sake-of-interesting set of opinions. Also, neither has a PredictionBook account that’s actively used (as far as I know; I’ve recently been using a pseudonym and maybe one of them is as well).
For some perspective, my younger brother Tim is very smart and in his years of peak intelligence, but does not have the high status associated with writing a widely read blog or being a professor, and his view on singularity related stuff, as far as I can tell, is that the future is too hard to predict for it to be worth bothering with. You could say that Robin and Eliezer are authorities on singularity-related topics because they write widely read blogs about them, but they write widely read blogs about them because they have positive predictions to make. So there’s a selection effect. If a smart person thinks the future is very uncertain, they aren’t going to put in the time & effort necessary to seem like a legitimate authority on the topic. (If you want someone who’s an authority on another topic who seems to agree with my brother, here’s Daniel Kahnman.)
This poll of Jane Street Capital geniuses seem like an even stronger argument that we shouldn’t have a strong opinion in either direction.
I don’t really trust Robin and Eliezer to be well-calibrated about what they don’t know. One way to become a public figure is to make interesting predictions, and both have used this strategy. So polling public-figure-ish smart people as opposed to smart people in general will tend to get us a more confidently expressed and interesting-for-the-sake-of-interesting set of opinions. Also, neither has a PredictionBook account that’s actively used (as far as I know; I’ve recently been using a pseudonym and maybe one of them is as well).
For some perspective, my younger brother Tim is very smart and in his years of peak intelligence, but does not have the high status associated with writing a widely read blog or being a professor, and his view on singularity related stuff, as far as I can tell, is that the future is too hard to predict for it to be worth bothering with. You could say that Robin and Eliezer are authorities on singularity-related topics because they write widely read blogs about them, but they write widely read blogs about them because they have positive predictions to make. So there’s a selection effect. If a smart person thinks the future is very uncertain, they aren’t going to put in the time & effort necessary to seem like a legitimate authority on the topic. (If you want someone who’s an authority on another topic who seems to agree with my brother, here’s Daniel Kahnman.)
This poll of Jane Street Capital geniuses seem like an even stronger argument that we shouldn’t have a strong opinion in either direction.