This post wasn’t clear about how the college students were asked about extinction, but here’s a hypothesis: public predictions for “the year of human extinction at 2500” and “the number of future humans at 9 billion” are a result of normies hearing a question that mentions “extinction”, imagining an extinction scenario or three, guessing a year and simply giving that year as their answer (without having made any attempt to mentally create a probability distribution).
I actually visited this page to learn about how the “persuasion” part of the tournament panned out, though, and I see nothing about that topic here. Guess I’ll check the post on AI next...
This post wasn’t clear about how the college students were asked about extinction, but here’s a hypothesis: public predictions for “the year of human extinction at 2500” and “the number of future humans at 9 billion” are a result of normies hearing a question that mentions “extinction”, imagining an extinction scenario or three, guessing a year and simply giving that year as their answer (without having made any attempt to mentally create a probability distribution).
I actually visited this page to learn about how the “persuasion” part of the tournament panned out, though, and I see nothing about that topic here. Guess I’ll check the post on AI next...