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Sniffnoy comments on New Year's Prediction Thread (2012) - Less Wrong
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I find this confusing; I would expect P vs. BQP to be harder to resolve than P vs. NP.
There's a fair bit of reason to think that neither of BQP and NP contains the other. But the primary cause for my reduced confidence is that I don't have a really good understanding of the quantum complexity classes whereas I do have more intuition for the classical classes like P and NP. So I've reduced the confidence accordingly.
If you feel you are relatively ignorant of quantum complexity and want to reduce your reliance on it, you should not simply reduce the number. That anchors on an arbitrary sign of the question. Why reduce 95% rather than the complementary 5%? Your prediction is, roughly, that P vs BQP will be resolved in 6 years. Phrased that way, isn't it overconfident?
Instead you should regress to an outside model. For example, it has been 30 years since Feynman's suggestion, so my outside model is that it won't be resolved in 30 years, so < 3% per year. Edit: this is a doomsday argument.
Also, if you think your inside model says that something is hard, but the number it yields is easier than the outside model, you probably aren't combining your information correctly.
Maybe because that pushes the probabilities towards the zero-knowledge position of 50%. (However, as you say, this isn't a zero-knowledge situation.)