Eliezer has a lot of intuitions and ways of thinking that he feels are supported by evidence, but I feel that part of what might be going on here is “public beliefs vs. private beliefs”: Eliezer believes he’s right, but it’s just very hard for most other people to see or understand why he believes this. Ideally, Eliezer would have started building a prediction track record 20 years ago to show that his intuitions and ways of thinking are better than other people’s, but he doesn’t appear to have any such record. I do still consider many of his arguments to be strong, and I think the world is very lucky that Eliezer exists. However, I feel I have to evaluate each of his arguments on its own merit rather than deferring to what I see as his appeal to authority (where he’s the authority), because I don’t think he has the track record to back up such an appeal.
I want to register a gripe: when Eliezer says that he, Demis Hassabis, and Dario Amodei have a good “track record” because of their qualitative prediction successes, Jotto objects that the phrase “track record” should be reserved for things like Metaculus forecasts.
But when Ben Garfinkel says that Eliezer has a bad “track record” because he made various qualitative predictions Ben disagrees with, Jotto sets aside his terminological scruples and slams the retweet button.
I already thought this narrowing of the term “track record” was weird. If you’re saying that we shouldn’t count Linus Pauling’s achievements in chemistry, or his bad arguments for Vitamin C megadosing, as part of Pauling’s “track record”, because they aren’t full probability distributions over concrete future events, then I worry a lot that this new word usage will cause confusion and lend itself to misuse.
As long as it’s used even-handedly, though, it’s ultimately just a word. On my model, the main consequence of this is just that “track records” matter a lot less, because they become a much smaller slice of the evidence we have about a lot of people’s epistemics, expertise, etc. (Jotto apparently disagrees, but this is orthogonal to the thing his post focuses on, which is ‘how dare you use the phrase “track record”’.)
But if you’re going to complain about “track record” talk when the track record is alleged to be good but not when it’s alleged to be bad, then I have a genuine gripe with this terminology proposal. It already sounded a heck of a lot like an isolated demand for rigor to me, but if you’re going to redefine “track record” to refer to a narrow slice of the evidence, you at least need to do this consistently, and not crow some variant of ‘Aha! His track record is terrible after all!’ as soon as you find equally qualitative evidence that you like.
This was already a thing I worried would happen if we adopted this terminological convention, and it happened immediately.
Very many thanks for your responses Rob, you’ve helped me update. (And hopefully others who might have had thoughts kinda similar to mine will view your responses and update accordingly:))
However, I feel I have to evaluate each of his arguments on its own merit rather than deferring to what I see as his appeal to authority (where he’s the authority)
Eliezer isn’t saying “believe me because I’m a trustworthy authority”; just the opposite. Eliezer is explicitly claiming that we’re all dead if we base our beliefs on this topic on deference, as opposed to evaluating arguments on their merits, figuring out the domain for ourselves, generating our own arguments for and against conclusions, refining our personal inside views of AGI alignment, etc.
(At least, his claim is that we need vastly, vastly more people doing that. Not every EA needs to do that, but currently we’re far below water on this dimension, on Eliezer’s model and on mine.)
My spicy take in one paragraph:
Eliezer has a lot of intuitions and ways of thinking that he feels are supported by evidence, but I feel that part of what might be going on here is “public beliefs vs. private beliefs”: Eliezer believes he’s right, but it’s just very hard for most other people to see or understand why he believes this. Ideally, Eliezer would have started building a prediction track record 20 years ago to show that his intuitions and ways of thinking are better than other people’s, but he doesn’t appear to have any such record. I do still consider many of his arguments to be strong, and I think the world is very lucky that Eliezer exists. However, I feel I have to evaluate each of his arguments on its own merit rather than deferring to what I see as his appeal to authority (where he’s the authority), because I don’t think he has the track record to back up such an appeal.
I want to register a gripe: when Eliezer says that he, Demis Hassabis, and Dario Amodei have a good “track record” because of their qualitative prediction successes, Jotto objects that the phrase “track record” should be reserved for things like Metaculus forecasts.
But when Ben Garfinkel says that Eliezer has a bad “track record” because he made various qualitative predictions Ben disagrees with, Jotto sets aside his terminological scruples and slams the retweet button.
I already thought this narrowing of the term “track record” was weird. If you’re saying that we shouldn’t count Linus Pauling’s achievements in chemistry, or his bad arguments for Vitamin C megadosing, as part of Pauling’s “track record”, because they aren’t full probability distributions over concrete future events, then I worry a lot that this new word usage will cause confusion and lend itself to misuse.
As long as it’s used even-handedly, though, it’s ultimately just a word. On my model, the main consequence of this is just that “track records” matter a lot less, because they become a much smaller slice of the evidence we have about a lot of people’s epistemics, expertise, etc. (Jotto apparently disagrees, but this is orthogonal to the thing his post focuses on, which is ‘how dare you use the phrase “track record”’.)
But if you’re going to complain about “track record” talk when the track record is alleged to be good but not when it’s alleged to be bad, then I have a genuine gripe with this terminology proposal. It already sounded a heck of a lot like an isolated demand for rigor to me, but if you’re going to redefine “track record” to refer to a narrow slice of the evidence, you at least need to do this consistently, and not crow some variant of ‘Aha! His track record is terrible after all!’ as soon as you find equally qualitative evidence that you like.
This was already a thing I worried would happen if we adopted this terminological convention, and it happened immediately.
</end of gripe>
Very many thanks for your responses Rob, you’ve helped me update. (And hopefully others who might have had thoughts kinda similar to mine will view your responses and update accordingly:))
Eliezer isn’t saying “believe me because I’m a trustworthy authority”; just the opposite. Eliezer is explicitly claiming that we’re all dead if we base our beliefs on this topic on deference, as opposed to evaluating arguments on their merits, figuring out the domain for ourselves, generating our own arguments for and against conclusions, refining our personal inside views of AGI alignment, etc.
(At least, his claim is that we need vastly, vastly more people doing that. Not every EA needs to do that, but currently we’re far below water on this dimension, on Eliezer’s model and on mine.)