This whole debate looks like a red herring to me. The entire distinction makes no sense-- all views are outside views. Our only knowledge of the future comes from knowledge of regularities. So all arguments are arguments from typicality. Some of that knowledge comes from surveys of how long it takes someone to finish a project. Some comes from experimental science. Some of that knowledge comes from repeated personal experience-- say completing lots of projects on time. Some of it is innate, driven into us though generations of evolution. But all of it is outside view. The so-called "inside view" arguments are just a lot harder to express by pointing to a single reference class. We believe Barack Obama is President because usually widely held beliefs about who holds important government positions is accurate, because the media doesn't lie about such things, because the people who get referred to as "President x" usually are president etc.
Those who are saying they are taking the outside view are just ignoring some of the relevant regularities for these big issues. Now there might be reason to disregard some of those regularities. For example, it seems clear that people are too biased to estimate how long it will take them to complete certain kinds of tasks. In these cases then, it makes sense to disregard their self-estimations. It turns out, in other words, that self-estimation isn't a very reliable regularity. There are other biases that will cause us to think something is reliable evidence when it isn't (or isn't once better evidence is considered). But the right approach is to identify those biases, not just assume some data isn't good evidence because it is part of this mysterious "inside view".
If AGI researchers are all suffering from a bias that leads them to conclude AGI will happen when they shouldn't I'm sure they would appreciate knowing that. If this is the case, someone should describe the bias and point to examples. But you can't just ignore their arguments that AGI will happen and just claim higher ground with "the outside view". Every view is an outside view, the question is which views are biased.
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.