I see a potential tension between how much weight you give this claim within your framework, versus how much you defer to outside views
I don’t know, for what it’s worth I feel like it’s pretty okay to have an inside view that’s in conflict with most other people’s and to still give a pretty big weight (i.e. 80%) to the outside view. (maybe this isn’t what you’re saying)
(and potentially even modest epistemology – gasp!)
Not sure I understood this, but the related statement “epistemic modesty implies Ben should give more than 80% weight to the outside view” seems reasonable. Actually maybe you’re saying “your inside view is so contrarian that it is very inside view-y, which suggests you should put more weight on the outside view than would otherwise be the case”, maybe I can sort of see that.
My understanding is that Lukas’s observation is more like:
At some points (e.g. P(AGI) timelines) you seem to give a lot of weight to (what you call) outside views and/or seem to be moved by ‘modest epistemology’.
But for P(TAI|AGI) your bottom line is very different from what most people in the community seem to think. This suggests you’re not updating much toward their view, and so don’t use “outside views”/modest epistemology here.
These suggest you’re using a different balance of sticking with your inside view vs. updating toward others for different questions/parameters. This does not need to be a problem, but it at least raises the question of why.
Yes, that’s what I meant. And FWIW, I wasn’t sure whether Ben was using modest epistemology (in my terminology, outside-view reasoning isn’t necessarily modest epistemology), but there were some passages in the original post that suggest low discrimination on how to construct the reference class. E.g., “10% on short timelines people” and “10% on long timelines people” suggests that one is simply including the sorts of timeline credences that happen to be around, without trying to evaluate people’s reasoning competence. For contrast, imagine wording things like this:
“10% credence each to persons A and B, who both appear to be well-informed on this topic and whose interestingly different reasoning styles both seem defensible to me, in the sense that I can’t confidently point out why one of them is better than the other.”
But for P(TAI|AGI) your bottom line is very different from what most people in the community seem to think
Ah right, I get the point now, thanks. I suppose my P(TAI|AGI) is supposed to be my inside view as opposed to my all-things-considered view, because I’m using it only for the inside view part of the process. The only things that are supposed to be all-things-considered views are things that come out of this long procedure I describe (i.e. the TAI and AGI timelines). But probably this wasn’t very clear.
I don’t know, for what it’s worth I feel like it’s pretty okay to have an inside view that’s in conflict with most other people’s and to still give a pretty big weight (i.e. 80%) to the outside view. (maybe this isn’t what you’re saying)
Not sure I understood this, but the related statement “epistemic modesty implies Ben should give more than 80% weight to the outside view” seems reasonable. Actually maybe you’re saying “your inside view is so contrarian that it is very inside view-y, which suggests you should put more weight on the outside view than would otherwise be the case”, maybe I can sort of see that.
My understanding is that Lukas’s observation is more like:
At some points (e.g. P(AGI) timelines) you seem to give a lot of weight to (what you call) outside views and/or seem to be moved by ‘modest epistemology’.
But for P(TAI|AGI) your bottom line is very different from what most people in the community seem to think. This suggests you’re not updating much toward their view, and so don’t use “outside views”/modest epistemology here.
These suggest you’re using a different balance of sticking with your inside view vs. updating toward others for different questions/parameters. This does not need to be a problem, but it at least raises the question of why.
Yes, that’s what I meant. And FWIW, I wasn’t sure whether Ben was using modest epistemology (in my terminology, outside-view reasoning isn’t necessarily modest epistemology), but there were some passages in the original post that suggest low discrimination on how to construct the reference class. E.g., “10% on short timelines people” and “10% on long timelines people” suggests that one is simply including the sorts of timeline credences that happen to be around, without trying to evaluate people’s reasoning competence. For contrast, imagine wording things like this:
“10% credence each to persons A and B, who both appear to be well-informed on this topic and whose interestingly different reasoning styles both seem defensible to me, in the sense that I can’t confidently point out why one of them is better than the other.”
Thanks, this was helpful as an example of one way I might improve this process.
Ah right, I get the point now, thanks. I suppose my P(TAI|AGI) is supposed to be my inside view as opposed to my all-things-considered view, because I’m using it only for the inside view part of the process. The only things that are supposed to be all-things-considered views are things that come out of this long procedure I describe (i.e. the TAI and AGI timelines). But probably this wasn’t very clear.