pianoforte611 comments on Community bias in threat evaluation - Less Wrong

5 Post author: pianoforte611 17 January 2014 04:01AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (26)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: pianoforte611 17 January 2014 02:11:34PM 2 points [-]

I deliberately didn't say that the majority of LessWrongers would give that answer. Partly because Lesswrong is only about 1/3 computer scientists/programmers. Also 14.5% is very high compared to most communities.

I didn't explicitly state an argument but if I were to it would be that communities with an interest in topic X are the most likely to think that topic X is the most important thing ever. So it isn't necessary for most computer scientists to think that unfriendly AI is the biggest problem for my argument to work, just that computer scientists are the most likely to think that it is the biggest problem.

Comment author: ChristianKl 18 January 2014 12:44:22AM *  4 points [-]

I deliberately didn't say that the majority of LessWrongers would give that answer. Partly because Lesswrong is only about 1/3 computer scientists/programmers.

Fortunately we have the census and the census does ask for the profession. Among those with the profession Computers (AI), Computers (practical: IT, programming, etc.) and Computers (other academic, computer science) 14.4% think that unfriendly AI is the biggest threat.

Lesswrong isn't a community that focuses much on bioengineered pandemics. Yet among those computer programmers 23.7% still think it's the greatest threat.

We are a community that actually cares about data.