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soreff comments on Reference class of the unclassreferenceable - Less Wrong
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It doesn't. I simply don't believe in Reference Class Tennis. Experiments show that the Outside View works great... for predicting how long Christmas shopping will take. That is, the Outside View works great when you've got a dozen examples that are no more dissimilar to your new case than they are to each other. By the time you start trying to predict the future 20 years out, choosing one out of a hundred potential reference classes is assuming your conclusion, whatever it may be.
How often do people successfully predict 20 years out - let alone longer - by picking some convenient reference class and saying "The Outside View is best, now I'm done and I don't want to hear any more arguments about the nitpicky details"?
Very rarely, I'd say. It's more of a conversation-halter than a proven mode of thinking about that level of problem, and things in the reference class "unproven conversation halter on difficult problems" don't usually do too well. There, now I'm done and I don't want to hear any more nitpicky details.
It also depends on which aspects of the future one is trying to predict... I'll go out on a limb here, and say that I think the angular momentum of the Earth will be within 1% of its current value 20 years out.
Even that is by no means certain if there are superintelligences around in 20 years, which is by no means impossible. The unFriendly ones especially might want to use Earth's atoms in some configuration other than a big sphere floating in space unconnected to anything else.
Good point - I'd thought that physical constraints would make disassembling the Earth take a large fraction of that time, but solar output is sufficient to do the job in roughly a million seconds, so yes, an unFriendly superintelligence could do it within the 20 year time frame.