I completely agree that the survey demographic will make a big difference to the headline results figure. Since I surveyed people interested in existential risk (Astral Codex Ten, LessWrong, EA Forum) I would expect the results to bias upwards though. (Almost) every participant in my survey agreed the headline risk was greater than the 1.6% figure from this essay, and generally my results line up with the Bensinger survey.
However, this is structurally similar to the state of Fermi Paradox estimates prior to SDO ‘dissolving’ this—that is, almost everyone working on the Drake Equation put the probable number of alien civilisations in this universe very high, because they missed the extremely subtle statistical point about uncertainty analysis SDO spotted, and which I have replicated in this essay. In my opinion, Section 4.3 indicates that as long as you have any order-of-magnitude uncertainty you will likely get asymmetric distribution of risk, and so in that sense I disagree that the mechanism depends on who you ask. The mechanism is the key part of the essay, the headline number is just one particular way to view that mechanism.
I completely agree that the survey demographic will make a big difference to the headline results figure. Since I surveyed people interested in existential risk (Astral Codex Ten, LessWrong, EA Forum) I would expect the results to bias upwards though. (Almost) every participant in my survey agreed the headline risk was greater than the 1.6% figure from this essay, and generally my results line up with the Bensinger survey.
However, this is structurally similar to the state of Fermi Paradox estimates prior to SDO ‘dissolving’ this—that is, almost everyone working on the Drake Equation put the probable number of alien civilisations in this universe very high, because they missed the extremely subtle statistical point about uncertainty analysis SDO spotted, and which I have replicated in this essay. In my opinion, Section 4.3 indicates that as long as you have any order-of-magnitude uncertainty you will likely get asymmetric distribution of risk, and so in that sense I disagree that the mechanism depends on who you ask. The mechanism is the key part of the essay, the headline number is just one particular way to view that mechanism.