NancyLebovitz comments on Open Thread, January 1-15, 2013 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: OpenThreadGuy 01 January 2013 06:09AM

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Comment author: NancyLebovitz 01 January 2013 08:58:52AM 3 points [-]

I thought I'd seen a survey result of when LWers thought the Singularity was plausible-- maybe a 50% over/under date, but I haven't been able to find it again. Does anyone remember such a thing?

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 01 January 2013 09:55:29AM *  5 points [-]

2009 survey results

When asked to determine a year in which the Singularity might take place, the mean guess was 9,899 AD, but this is only because one person insisted on putting 100,000 AD. The median might be a better measure in this case; it was mid-2067.

2011 survey results

The mean for the Singularity question is useless because of the very high numbers some people put in, but the median was 2080 (quartiles 2050, 2080, 2150). The Singularity has gotten later since 2009: the median guess then was 2067. There was some discussion about whether people might have been anchored by the previous mention of 2100 in the x-risk question. I changed the order after 104 responses to prevent this; a t-test found no significant difference between the responses before and after the change (in fact, the trend was in the wrong direction).

The 2012 survey also had a "date of the Singularity" question, but Yvain didn't report on the results of that question, so you'll have to look at the raw data for that.

Comment author: gwern 01 January 2013 06:27:46PM 5 points [-]

The 2012 survey also had a "date of the Singularity" question, but Yvain didn't report on the results of that question, so you'll have to look at the raw data for that.

R> lw <- read.csv("2012.csv")
R> lw <- as.integer(as.character(lw$Singularity))
R> summary(lw[lw > 2011 & lw < 5000])
Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max. NA's
2010 2060 2080 2140 2150 4000 236

Had to filter because of idiots putting in values like 2147483647 or 30 or 1800.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 January 2013 09:22:04PM 2 points [-]

Note that the last survey made it explicitly clear that the question was “what is the year such that P(Singularity before year|Singularity ever) = P(Singularity after year|Singularity ever) = 0.5”, whereas in the previous surveys it was ambiguous between that and “P(Singularity before year) = P(Singularity after year) + P(no Singularity ever) = 0.5”.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 01 January 2013 04:43:58PM 2 points [-]

Thank you.

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