There’s more variety than I expected in the group of people who are deferred to
I suspect that some of the people in the “everyone else” cluster defer to people in one of the other clusters—in which case there is more deference happening than these results suggest.
There were more “inside view” responses than I expected (maybe partly because people who have inside views were incentivised to respond, because it’s cool to say you have inside views or something). Might be interesting to think about whether it’s good (on the community level) for this number of people to have inside views on this topic.
Metaculus was given less weight than I expected (but as per Eli (see footnote 2), I think that’s a good thing).
Grace et al. AI expert surveys (1, 2) were deferred to less than I expected (but again, I think that’s good—many respondents to those surveys seem to have inconsistent views, see here for more details. And also there’s not much reason to expect AI experts to be excellent at forecasting things like AGI—it’s not their job, it’s probably not a skill they spend time training).
It seems that if you go around talking to lots of people about AI timelines, you could move the needle on community beliefs more than I expected.
Thanks for doing this survey and sharing the results, super interesting!
Regarding
maybe partly because people who have inside views were incentivised to respond, because it’s cool to say you have inside views or something
Yes, I definitely think that there’s a lot of potential for social desirability bias here! And I think this can happen even if the responses are anonymous, as people might avoid the cognitive dissonance that comes with admitting to “not having an inside view.” One might even go as far as framing the results as “Who do people claim to defer to?”
Things that surprised me about the results
There’s more variety than I expected in the group of people who are deferred to
I suspect that some of the people in the “everyone else” cluster defer to people in one of the other clusters—in which case there is more deference happening than these results suggest.
There were more “inside view” responses than I expected (maybe partly because people who have inside views were incentivised to respond, because it’s cool to say you have inside views or something). Might be interesting to think about whether it’s good (on the community level) for this number of people to have inside views on this topic.
Metaculus was given less weight than I expected (but as per Eli (see footnote 2), I think that’s a good thing).
Grace et al. AI expert surveys (1, 2) were deferred to less than I expected (but again, I think that’s good—many respondents to those surveys seem to have inconsistent views, see here for more details. And also there’s not much reason to expect AI experts to be excellent at forecasting things like AGI—it’s not their job, it’s probably not a skill they spend time training).
It seems that if you go around talking to lots of people about AI timelines, you could move the needle on community beliefs more than I expected.
Thanks for doing this survey and sharing the results, super interesting!
Regarding
Yes, I definitely think that there’s a lot of potential for social desirability bias here! And I think this can happen even if the responses are anonymous, as people might avoid the cognitive dissonance that comes with admitting to “not having an inside view.” One might even go as far as framing the results as “Who do people claim to defer to?”