Vladimir_Nesov comments on Call for new SIAI Visiting Fellows, on a rolling basis - Less Wrong

29 Post author: AnnaSalamon 01 December 2009 01:42AM

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Comment author: gwern 10 December 2009 12:20:53AM 5 points [-]

Reminds me of Kevin Kelly's The Maes-Garreau Point:

"Nonetheless, her colleagues really, seriously expected this bridge to immortality to appear soon. How soon? Well, curiously, the dates they predicted for the Singularity seem to cluster right before the years they were expected to die. Isn’t that a coincidence?"

Possibly the most single disturbing bias-related essay I've read, because I realized as I was reading it that my own uploading prediction was very close to my expected lifespan (based on my family history) - only 10 or 20 years past my death. It surprises me sometimes that no one else on LW/OB seems to've heard of Kelly's Maes-Garreau Point.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 10 December 2009 12:10:18PM *  1 point [-]

It surprises me sometimes that no one else on LW/OB seems to've heard of Kelly's Maes-Garreau Point.

It would be very surprising if you are right. I expect most of the people who have thought about the question of how such estimates could be biased would think of this idea within the first several minutes (even if without experimental data).

Comment author: gwern 10 December 2009 01:40:18PM 0 points [-]

It may be an obvious point on which to be biased, but how many of such people then go on to work out birthdates and prediction dates or to look for someone else's work on those lines like Maes-Garreau?

Comment author: CarlShulman 10 December 2009 03:26:45PM 1 point [-]

A lot of folk at SIAI have looked at and for age correlations.

Comment author: gwern 10 December 2009 09:36:22PM 1 point [-]

And found?

Comment author: CarlShulman 11 December 2009 02:00:18AM *  6 points [-]

1) Among those sampled, the young do not seem to systematically predict a later Singularity.

2) People do update their estimates based on incremental data (as they should), so we distinguish between estimated dates, and estimated time-from-present.

2a) A lot of people burned by the 1980s AI bubble shifted both of those into the future.

3) A lot of AI folk with experience from that bubble have a strong taboo against making predictions for fear of harming the field by raising expectations. This skews the log of public predictions.

4) Younger people working on AGI (like Shane Legg, Google's Moshe Looks) are a self-selected group and tend to think that it is relatively close (within decades,and their careers).

5) Random smart folk, not working on AI (physicists, philosophers, economists), of varied ages, tend to put broad distributions on AGI development with central tendencies in the mid-21st century.

Comment author: gwern 14 August 2012 12:53:23AM *  0 points [-]

Is there any chance of the actual data or writeups being released? It's been almost 3 years now.

Comment author: CarlShulman 14 August 2012 01:12:54AM 0 points [-]

Lukeprog has a big spreadsheet. I don't know his plans for it.

Comment author: gwern 14 August 2012 01:21:37AM 0 points [-]

Hm... I wonder if that's the big spreadsheet ksotala has been working on for a while?

Comment author: lukeprog 18 August 2012 05:29:43AM 1 point [-]

Yes. An improved version of the spreadsheet, which serves as the data set for Stuart's recent writeup, will probably be released when the Stuart+Kaj paper is published, or perhaps earlier.

Comment author: gwern 11 December 2009 05:24:30PM *  0 points [-]
  1. evidence for, apparently
  2. Yes but shouldn't we use the earliest predictions by a person? Even a heavily biased person may produce reasonable estimates given enough data. The first few estimates are likely to be based most on intuition - or bias, in another word.
  3. But which way? There may be a publication bias to 'true believers' but then there may also be a bias towards unobjectionably far away estimates like Minsky's 5 to 500 years. (One wonders what odds Minsky genuinely assigns to the first AI being created in 2500 AD.)
  4. Reasonable. Optimism is an incentive to work, and self-deception is probably relevant.
  5. Evidence for, isn't it? Especially if they assign even weak belief in significant life-extension breakthroughs, ~2050 is within their conceivable lifespan (since they know humans currently don't live past ~120, they'd have to be >~80 to be sure of not reaching 2050).
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