But evidence of the "just believe me I'm special" variety won't.
Oh come on, no-one is arguing that this should convince you. Obviously the outside view is the correct position in the absence of inside view evidence, no-one disputes that. The dispute is this: some people seem to believe that any effort to look into the details of the claim rather than taking the outside view is simply a self-serving effort to avoid the conclusions the outside view brings you to. Taken to extremes this leads to the position I'm mocking. If you agree that inside view evidence is worth examining, then we're on the same side in this discussion.
If you agree that inside view evidence is worth examining, then we're on the same side in this discussion.
Isn't the whole point of the outside view, as laid out in Eliezer's original post, that sometimes you can get a better prediction by deliberately ignoring relevant inside view evidence? We need an algorithm to determine which inside view evidence to ignore, and the optimal algorithm clearly can't be either "all" or "none".
My instinct is to be conservative in how much inside view evidence to ignore. That is, only adopt the outside...
I think some of our recent arguments against applying the outside view are wrong.
1. In response to taw's post, Eliezer paints the outside view argument against the Singularity thus:
This is an unfair representation. One of the poster-child cases for the outside view (mentioned by Eliezer, no less!) dealt with students trying to estimate completion times for their academic projects. And what is AGI if not a research project? One might say AGI is too large for the analogy to work, but outside view helpfully tells us that large projects aren't any more immune to failures and schedule overruns :-)
2. In response to my comment claiming that Dennett didn't solve the problem of consciousness "because philosophers don't solve problems", ciphergoth writes:
The outside view may be rephrased as "argument from typicality". If we'd just heard of this random dude named Barack Obama, we'd be perfectly justified in saying he won't become President! Which would be the proper analogy to first hearing about Dennett and his work. Another casual application of the outside view corroborates the conclusion: what other problems has Dennett solved? Is the problem of consciousness the first problem he solved? Does this seem typical of anything?
3. Technologos attacks taw's post, again, with the following argument:
For each particular highly speculative technology, we can assert that it won't appear with high confidence (let's say 90%). But this doesn't mean the future will be the same in all respects! The conjunction of many 90%-statements (X won't appear, AND Y won't appear, AND etc.) gets assigned the product, a very low confidence, as it should. We're sure that some new technologies will arise, we just don't know which ones. Fusion power? Flying cars? We've been on the fast track to those for some time now, and they still sound less far out then the Singularity! Anyone who's worked with tech for any length of time can recite a looooong list of Real Soon Now technologies that never materialized.
4. In response to a pro-outside-view comment by taw, wedrifid snaps:
Well, duh. If the red pill doesn't make you offended about your pet project, you aren't taking enough of it :-) The method works with nonzero efficiency as long as we're pattern-matching on relevant traits or any traits causally connected to relevant traits, which means pretty much every superficial similarity gives you nonzero information. And the conjunction rule applies, so the more similar stuff you can find, the better. 'Pulling a similarity out of your arse' isn't something to be ashamed of - it's the whole point of the outside view. Even a superficial similarity is harder to fake, more entangled with reality, more objective than a long chain of reasoning or a credence percentage you came up with. In real-world reasoning, parallel beats sequential.
In conclusion let's grant the inside view object-level advocates the benefit of the doubt one last time. Conveniently, the handful of people who say we must believe in the Singularity are all doing work in the AGI field. We can gauge exactly how believable their object-level arguments are by examining their past claims about the schedules of their own projects - the perfect case for the inside view if there ever was one... No, I won't spell out the sordid collection of hyperlinks here. Every reader is encouraged to Google on their own for past announcements by Doug Lenat, Ben Goertzel, Eliezer Yudkowsky (those are actually the heroes of the bunch), or other people that I'm afraid to name at the moment.