It’s not that intuition is superior: it is broad, latent, all-things-considered (where all formal models are some-things-considered). The smell test it enables is all we have against model error. (And inverters are just a nasty kind of model error.)
I consider naming particular [AGI timeline median] years to be a cognitively harmful sort of activity; I have refrained from trying to translate my brain’s native intuitions about this into probabilities, for fear that my verbalized probabilities will be stupider than my intuitions if I try to put weight on them. What feelings I do have, I worry may be unwise to voice; AGI timelines, in my own experience, are not great for one’s mental health, and I worry that other people seem to have weaker immune systems than even my own. But I suppose I cannot but acknowledge that my outward behavior seems to reveal a distribution whose median seems to fall well before 2050.
It’s not that intuition is superior: it is broad, latent, all-things-considered (where all formal models are some-things-considered). The smell test it enables is all we have against model error. (And inverters are just a nasty kind of model error.)
Here’s Yudkowsky, even: