There’s a little bit on how to think about the XPT results in relation to other forecasts here (not much). Extrapolating from there to Samotsvety in particular:
Reasons to favour XPT (superforecaster) forecasts:
Larger sample size
The forecasts were incentivised (via reciprocal scoring, a bit more detail here)
The most accurate XPT forecasters in terms of reciprocal scoring also gave the lowest probabilities on AI risk (and reciprocal scoring accuracy may correlate with actual accuracy)
Speculative reasons to favour Samotsvety forecasts:
(Guessing) They’ve spent longer on average thinking about it
(Guessing) They have deeper technical expertise than the XPT superforecasters
I also haven’t looked in detail at the respective resolution criteria, but at first glance the forecasts also seem relatively hard to compare directly. (I agree with you though that the discrepancy is large enough that it suggests a large disagreement were the two groups to forecast the same question—just expect that it will be hard to work out how large.)
Good question.
There’s a little bit on how to think about the XPT results in relation to other forecasts here (not much). Extrapolating from there to Samotsvety in particular:
Reasons to favour XPT (superforecaster) forecasts:
Larger sample size
The forecasts were incentivised (via reciprocal scoring, a bit more detail here)
The most accurate XPT forecasters in terms of reciprocal scoring also gave the lowest probabilities on AI risk (and reciprocal scoring accuracy may correlate with actual accuracy)
Speculative reasons to favour Samotsvety forecasts:
(Guessing) They’ve spent longer on average thinking about it
(Guessing) They have deeper technical expertise than the XPT superforecasters
I also haven’t looked in detail at the respective resolution criteria, but at first glance the forecasts also seem relatively hard to compare directly. (I agree with you though that the discrepancy is large enough that it suggests a large disagreement were the two groups to forecast the same question—just expect that it will be hard to work out how large.)