Comment on The mind-killer

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 21:27:11 GMT

I have confidence that nobody here has secret information that makes human extinction much more likely - because almost no information which currently exists could have more than a marginal bearing on a result which, if likely, is a result of human (that is, intelligent) interaction. Therefore I have confidence that the difference in estimates is largely not due to information, but to models. I have confidence that inductive models - say, "how often does a random species survive any hundred year period, correcting for initial population" give answers over 95% which should be considered the default. Therefore, I have confidence that a community of people who generally give lower estimates is subject to some biases (such as narrative bias).

Doesn't mean LW's wrong and I'm right. But to believe that human extinction within a century is likely clearly puts LW in the minority of humanity in your beliefs - even in the minority of rational atheists. And the fact that there is substantial agreement within the LW community on this, when uncertainty is clearly so high that orders of magnitude of disagreement are possible, makes me suspect bias.

Also, I find it funny that people will argue passionately over estimates that differ in log(p/q) from -1 to +1 (~10% to ~90%), but couldn't care less over the difference from say -9 to -7 (.0001% vs .000001%) or 7 to 9. This is in one sense the right attitude for people who think they can do something about it, but it ends up biasing numbers towards log(p/q)=0 [ie 50%], since you are more likely to get argument from somebody who has an estimate on the other side of 50% as yours is.

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