akash 🔸 comments on How bad a future do ML researchers expect?

[akash 🔸]

Disagree-voting for the following reasons:

1. 700 people — that is a substantial sample size.

2. I think sampling bias will likely be small/​inconsequential, given the sample size.

   1. Ideally, yes, not having any logos would be great, but if I got an email asking me, “fill out this survey, and trust me, I am from a legitimate organization,” I probably wouldn’t fill out the survey.

   2. “very likely it is just the people familiar with lesswrong etc who has heard of these organizations”

      1. Hard to say if this is true

      2. It is wrong to assume that familiarity with LW would lead people to answer a certain way. However, I can imagine people who dislike LW/​similar would also be keen to complete the survey.

      3. The survey questions don’t seem to prime respondents one way or the other.

      4. These 700 people did publish in ICML/​NeurIPS; they have some degree of legitimacy.

3. Nitpicky, but “a proportion of ML researchers who have published in top conferences such as ICML and NeurIPS think AI research could be bad” is probably a more accurate statement. I agree that this doesn’t make the statements they are commenting on = truth; however, I think their opinion has a lot of value.

I think Metaculus does a decent job at forecasting, and their forecasts are updated based on recent advances, but yes, predicting the future is hard.