While there are some Metaculus questions that ask for predictions of the actual risk, the ones I selected are all conditional of the form, “If a global catastrophe occurs, will it be due X”. So they should be more comparable to the RP question “Which of the following do you think is most likely to cause human extinction?”
Given the differences in the questions it doesn’t seem correct to compare the raw probabilities provided across these—also our question was specifically about extinction rather than just a catastrophe. That being said there may be some truth to this implying some difference between the population estimates and what the metaculus estimates imply if we rank them—AI risk comes out top on the metaculus ratings and bottom in the public, and climate change also shows a sizable rank difference.
One wrinkle in taking the rankings like this would be that people were only allowed to pick one item in our questions, and so it is also possible that the rankings could be different if people actually rated each one and then we ranked their ratings. This would be the case if e.g., all the other risks are more likely than AI to be the absolute top risk across people, but many people have AI risk as their second risk, which would suggest a very high ordinal ranking that we can’t see from looking at the distribution of top picks.
While there are some Metaculus questions that ask for predictions of the actual risk, the ones I selected are all conditional of the form, “If a global catastrophe occurs, will it be due X”. So they should be more comparable to the RP question “Which of the following do you think is most likely to cause human extinction?”
Given the differences in the questions it doesn’t seem correct to compare the raw probabilities provided across these—also our question was specifically about extinction rather than just a catastrophe. That being said there may be some truth to this implying some difference between the population estimates and what the metaculus estimates imply if we rank them—AI risk comes out top on the metaculus ratings and bottom in the public, and climate change also shows a sizable rank difference.
One wrinkle in taking the rankings like this would be that people were only allowed to pick one item in our questions, and so it is also possible that the rankings could be different if people actually rated each one and then we ranked their ratings. This would be the case if e.g., all the other risks are more likely than AI to be the absolute top risk across people, but many people have AI risk as their second risk, which would suggest a very high ordinal ranking that we can’t see from looking at the distribution of top picks.