I guess you take speculation about long-term effects as Bayesian evidence, but only as extremely weak evidence compared to evidence about near-term effects. Is that right?
I think I basically completely discount speculation about long-term effects unless it comes with an effect size estimate justified by observation, and I haven’t seen any (although they might still be out there).
On the other hand, we can actually observe short-term effects (from similar interventions or the same intervention in a different context).
I think I’m particularly skeptical of the benefits of technical research for longtermist interventions, e.g. technical AI safety research, since there’s little precedent or feedback. For example, “How much closer does this paper bring us to solving AI safety?” My impression is that it’s basically just speculation that the research does anything useful at all in expectation. I’ve been meaning to get through this, though, and then there’s a separate question about the quality of research, especially research that doesn’t get published in journals (although some of it is).
There are also the reference class problem and issues in generalizability, and we can’t know how bad they are for longtermist work, since we don’t have good feedback.
I think I basically completely discount speculation about long-term effects unless it comes with an effect size estimate justified by observation, and I haven’t seen any (although they might still be out there).
On the other hand, we can actually observe short-term effects (from similar interventions or the same intervention in a different context).
I think I’m particularly skeptical of the benefits of technical research for longtermist interventions, e.g. technical AI safety research, since there’s little precedent or feedback. For example, “How much closer does this paper bring us to solving AI safety?” My impression is that it’s basically just speculation that the research does anything useful at all in expectation. I’ve been meaning to get through this, though, and then there’s a separate question about the quality of research, especially research that doesn’t get published in journals (although some of it is).
There are also the reference class problem and issues in generalizability, and we can’t know how bad they are for longtermist work, since we don’t have good feedback.