I agree that p(doom) is rhetorically ineffective—to normal people, it just looks weird, off-putting, pretentious, and depressing. Most folks out there have never taken a probability and statistics course, and don’t know what p(X) means in general, much less p(doom).
I also agree that p(doom) is way too ambiguous, in all the ways you mentioned, plus another crucial way: it isn’t conditioned on anything we actually do about AI risk. Our p(doom) given an effective global AI regulation regime might be a lot lower than p(doom) if we do nothing. And the fact that p(doom) isn’t conditioned on our response to p(doom) creates a sense of fatalistic futility, as if p(doom) is a quantitative fact of nature, like the Planck constant or the Coulomb constant, rather than a variable that reflects our collective response to AI risks, and that could go up or down quite dramatically given human behavior.
Isaac—good, persuasive post.
I agree that p(doom) is rhetorically ineffective—to normal people, it just looks weird, off-putting, pretentious, and depressing. Most folks out there have never taken a probability and statistics course, and don’t know what p(X) means in general, much less p(doom).
I also agree that p(doom) is way too ambiguous, in all the ways you mentioned, plus another crucial way: it isn’t conditioned on anything we actually do about AI risk. Our p(doom) given an effective global AI regulation regime might be a lot lower than p(doom) if we do nothing. And the fact that p(doom) isn’t conditioned on our response to p(doom) creates a sense of fatalistic futility, as if p(doom) is a quantitative fact of nature, like the Planck constant or the Coulomb constant, rather than a variable that reflects our collective response to AI risks, and that could go up or down quite dramatically given human behavior.