This is very interesting, really happy to see this. As normal, I think it’s good to take these with a big grain of salt—but I’m happy to get any halfway-reasonable attempt at a starting point.
One big issue here is that the boundaries are for the 25th/50th/75th percentiles. I would have expected many of there extrapolations to get much wilder (either doom or utopia), but maybe much of that is outside these percentiles.
Even then though, I imagine many readers around here might give >25% odds to at least one of “discontinuous benefit or catastrophic harm”, by 2122. 2122 is a really long time.
Many of the confidence bands seem to grow linearly over time, instead of exponentially or similar. This is surprising to me.
One point: I would be pretty enthusiastic about people making “meta-predictions”, treating these as baselines. For instance, “In 5 years, these estimates be revised. The difference will be less than 20%. This includes estimates in these 5 years”.
That way, onlookers could make quick forecasts on “how correct this set of forecasts” is, using simpler (not time-series) methods.
One thing worth noting is that extinction and extreme economic collapse were excluded from all except 2 questions (GDP and total population) to make the forecasts more interpretable (more info on this in the appendix). This might explain some of the confidence you see, though it also might not!
This comment was copied from a reply I made on the EA forecasting and epistemics slack.
What would that add? I think that would add speculation on to what is already speculation, and I’d think only the passing of time would be able to give feedback on whether the predictions turn out to be true.
I guess it could give more information, if you sought out different people for the meta-predictions, than had made the original predictions. But then I’m not sure why you wouldn’t just have these new people do the original prediction questions directly.
This is very interesting, really happy to see this. As normal, I think it’s good to take these with a big grain of salt—but I’m happy to get any halfway-reasonable attempt at a starting point.
One big issue here is that the boundaries are for the 25th/50th/75th percentiles. I would have expected many of there extrapolations to get much wilder (either doom or utopia), but maybe much of that is outside these percentiles.
Even then though, I imagine many readers around here might give >25% odds to at least one of “discontinuous benefit or catastrophic harm”, by 2122. 2122 is a really long time.
Many of the confidence bands seem to grow linearly over time, instead of exponentially or similar. This is surprising to me.
One point: I would be pretty enthusiastic about people making “meta-predictions”, treating these as baselines. For instance, “In 5 years, these estimates be revised. The difference will be less than 20%. This includes estimates in these 5 years”.
That way, onlookers could make quick forecasts on “how correct this set of forecasts” is, using simpler (not time-series) methods.
One thing worth noting is that extinction and extreme economic collapse were excluded from all except 2 questions (GDP and total population) to make the forecasts more interpretable (more info on this in the appendix). This might explain some of the confidence you see, though it also might not!
This comment was copied from a reply I made on the EA forecasting and epistemics slack.
What would that add? I think that would add speculation on to what is already speculation, and I’d think only the passing of time would be able to give feedback on whether the predictions turn out to be true.
I guess it could give more information, if you sought out different people for the meta-predictions, than had made the original predictions. But then I’m not sure why you wouldn’t just have these new people do the original prediction questions directly.