army1987 comments on Counterfactual resiliency test for non-causal models - Less Wrong

21 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 30 August 2012 05:30PM

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Comment author: V_V 31 August 2012 08:40:53PM 1 point [-]

I'm not sure that these conterfactual arguments are appropriate.

However, it seems to me that Moore is obviously in a different category than Hanson and Kurzweil:

Moore's law was formulated as a description of an empirically observable trend. As far as I know, Moore didn't use it to make far future predictions (the Wikipedia page quotes a prediction at 10 years). Moreover, Moore's laws refers to well-defined variables (transistor density at minimum cost per transistor, in the original formulation) for which accurate and complete estimates are available.

Hanson and Kurzweil, instead, pick a number of ill-defined, sparse, heterogeneous "revolutions" (they even conflate biological evolution with technological innovation) which they fit on a curve that they then extrapolate to make far future speculations.