The future will certainly resemble a story -- or, more accurately, will be capable of being placed into several plausible narrative frames, just as the past has. The bias you're probably trying to point to is in interpreting any particular plausible story as evidence for its individual components -- or, for that matter, against.
The conjunction fallacy implies that any particular vision of a Singularity-like outcome is less likely than our untrained intuitions would lead us to believe. It's an excellent reason to be skeptical of any highly derived theories of the future -- the specifics of Ray Kurzweil's singularity timeline, for example, or Robin Hanson's Malthusian emverse. But I don't think it's a good reason to be skeptical of any of the dominant singularity models in general form. Those don't work back from a compelling image to first principles; most of them don't even present specific consequential predictions, for fairly straightforward reasons. All the complexity is right there on the surface, and attempts to narrativize it inevitably run up against limits of imagination. (As evidence, the strong Singularity has been fairly poor at producing fiction when compared to most future histories of comparable generality; there's no equivalent of Heinlein writing stories about nuclear-powered space colonization, although there's quite a volume of stories about weak or partial singularities.)
So yes, there's not going to be a singleton AI bent on turning us all into paperclips. But that's a deliberately absurd instantiation of a much more general pattern. I can conceive of a number of ways in which the general pattern too might be wrong, but the conjunction fallacy doesn't fly; a number of attempted debunkings, meanwhile, do suffer from narrative fixation issues.
Superhero bias is a more interesting question -- but it's also a more specific one.
Well, any sequence of events can be placed in a narrative frame with enough of a stretch, but the fact remains that different sequence of events differ in their amenability to this; fiction is not a random sampling from the space of possible things we could imagine happening, and the Singularity is narratively far stronger than most imaginable futures, to a degree that indicates bias we should correct for. I've seen a fair bit of strong Singularity fiction at this stage, though being, well, singular, it tends not to be amenable to repeated stories by the same author the way Heinlein's vision of nuclear powered space colonization was.
What did Will mean? To take an idea seriously is “to update a belief and then accurately and completely propagate that belief update through the entire web of beliefs in which it is embedded,” as in a Bayesian belief network (see right).
Belief propagation is what happened, for example, when I first encountered that thundering paragraph from I.J. Good (1965):
Good’s paragraph ran me over like a train. Not because it was absurd, but because it was clearly true. Intelligence explosion was a direct consequence of things I already believed, I just hadn’t noticed! Humans do not automatically propagate their beliefs, so I hadn’t noticed that my worldview already implied intelligence explosion.
I spent a week looking for counterarguments, to check whether I was missing something, and then accepted intelligence explosion to be likely (so long as scientific progress continued). And though I hadn’t read Eliezer on the complexity of value, I had read David Hume and Joshua Greene. So I already understood that an arbitrary artificial intelligence would almost certainly not share our values.
Accepting my belief update about intelligence explosion, I propagated its implications throughout my web of beliefs. I realized that:
I had encountered the I.J. Good paragraph on Less Wrong, so I put my other projects on hold and spent the next month reading almost everything Eliezer had written. I also found articles by Nick Bostrom and Steve Omohundro. I began writing articles for Less Wrong and learning from the community. I applied to Singularity Institute’s Visiting Fellows program and was accepted. I quit my job in L.A., moved to Berkeley, worked my ass off, got hired, and started collecting research related to rationality and intelligence explosion.
My story surprises people because it is unusual. Human brains don’t usually propagate new beliefs so thoroughly.
But this isn’t just another post on taking ideas seriously. Will already offered some ideas on how to propagate beliefs. He also listed some ideas that most people probably aren’t taking seriously enough. My purpose here is to examine one prerequisite of successful belief propagation: actually making sure your beliefs are connected to each other in the first place.
If your beliefs aren’t connected to each other, there may be no paths along which you can propagate a new belief update.
I’m not talking about the problem of free-floating beliefs that don’t control your anticipations. No, I’m talking about “proper” beliefs that require observation, can be updated by evidence, and pay rent in anticipated experiences. The trouble is that even proper beliefs can be inadequately connected to other proper beliefs inside the human mind.
I wrote this post because I'm not sure what the "making sure your beliefs are actually connected in the first place" skill looks like when broken down to the 5-second level.
I was chatting about this with atucker, who told me he noticed that successful businessmen may have this trait more often than others. But what are they doing, at the 5-second level? What are people like Eliezer and Carl doing? How does one engage in the purposeful decompartmentalization of one's own mind?