I argue that advances in short-range forecasting (particularly in quality of predictions, number of hours invested, and the quality and decision-relevance of questions) can be robustly and significantly useful for existential risk reduction, even without directly improving our ability to forecast long-range outcomes, and without large step-change improvements to our current approaches to forecasting itself (as opposed to our pipelines for and ways of organizing forecasting efforts).
But I don’t actually see much evidence or argumentation in this post? It seems like you’re mainly talking about how to improve short-range forecasting, rather than why it’s useful?
It seems like the one argument for usefulness is that we can notice when we need to act, which can happen in bio by asking “what’s the probability of an existentially risky pandemic”, and maybe can also happen in AI but you’re not sure how yet. Things I’d be interested in to get more of a sense of whether short-range forecasting is actually useful:
Are there more questions that would be useful to get short-range forecasts on? Or does it end up being too hard to operationalize?
What are some examples of useful actions that we get to take, that we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to take if we didn’t have the lead time that the forecasting buys us?
How valuable are those actions? Can we use that to back out a cost-effectiveness estimate for the improved forecasting?
I agree there’s a shift between the title and the first two paragraphs and the rest of the post. I think the post could be clearer about the fact that its entire work is being done by the single hypothetical use-case.
However, I’m pretty happy to see a post dig into a single specific case. I agree with Linch’s feeling that a lot of forecasting win conditions are based on turning short term into long term forecasting, and was excited to see this post.
Indeed, your questions also want to dig into this example, so maybe you agree that this case is useful?
OTOH, this post does spend a significant amount of time digging into issues that seem relatively unrelated to convincing me of the question “will something like this work?” and indeed I didn’t read them.
I totally agree that this is a useful case to look into! I just wish that the post actually looked into it, rather than simply stating that it would be useful without justifying it.
(I also think that you could just change the title + thesis of the post to something else, and that would also be a good post.)
Thanks for the feedback! I agree the title was not great in that it poorly represented the contents, which is more like “argument via a single extended hypothetical example that was elaborated on.” This was an issue that was brought up in the review stage, but I didn’t think of a better title after some time and decided that publishing was better than waiting.
EDIT: As an update, the title has indeed been changed.
It sounds like your thesis is:
But I don’t actually see much evidence or argumentation in this post? It seems like you’re mainly talking about how to improve short-range forecasting, rather than why it’s useful?
It seems like the one argument for usefulness is that we can notice when we need to act, which can happen in bio by asking “what’s the probability of an existentially risky pandemic”, and maybe can also happen in AI but you’re not sure how yet. Things I’d be interested in to get more of a sense of whether short-range forecasting is actually useful:
Are there more questions that would be useful to get short-range forecasts on? Or does it end up being too hard to operationalize?
What are some examples of useful actions that we get to take, that we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to take if we didn’t have the lead time that the forecasting buys us?
How valuable are those actions? Can we use that to back out a cost-effectiveness estimate for the improved forecasting?
Thanks for engaging critically! Upvoted.
I agree there’s a shift between the title and the first two paragraphs and the rest of the post. I think the post could be clearer about the fact that its entire work is being done by the single hypothetical use-case.
However, I’m pretty happy to see a post dig into a single specific case. I agree with Linch’s feeling that a lot of forecasting win conditions are based on turning short term into long term forecasting, and was excited to see this post.
Indeed, your questions also want to dig into this example, so maybe you agree that this case is useful?
OTOH, this post does spend a significant amount of time digging into issues that seem relatively unrelated to convincing me of the question “will something like this work?” and indeed I didn’t read them.
I totally agree that this is a useful case to look into! I just wish that the post actually looked into it, rather than simply stating that it would be useful without justifying it.
(I also think that you could just change the title + thesis of the post to something else, and that would also be a good post.)
Thanks for the feedback! I agree the title was not great in that it poorly represented the contents, which is more like “argument via a single extended hypothetical example that was elaborated on.” This was an issue that was brought up in the review stage, but I didn’t think of a better title after some time and decided that publishing was better than waiting.
EDIT: As an update, the title has indeed been changed.