Inverse relationship between belief in foom and years worked in commercial software

NancyLebovitz

http://reducing-suffering.org/predictions-agi-takeoff-speed-vs-years-worked-commercial-software/

This has a very low n=16, and so presumably some strong selection biases. (Surely these are not the only people who have published thought-out opinions on the the likelihood of fooming.) Without an analysis of the reasons these people give for their views, I don't think this correlation is very interesting.

Thanks for the comment. There is some "multiple hypothesis testing" effect at play in the sense that I constructed the graph because of a hunch that I'd see a correlation of this type, based on a few salient examples that I knew about. I wouldn't have made a graph of some other comparison where I didn't expect much insight.

However, when it came to adding people, I did so purely based on whether I could clearly identify their views on the hard/soft question and years worked in industry. I'm happy to add anyone else to the graph if I can figure out... (read more)

1[anonymous]11y

Agree RE the low N, a wider survey would be much more informative. But if the proposition was "belief in a cortex-wide neural code" and the x axis was "years working in neuroscience", would the correlation still be uninteresting? Obviously I'm suggesting that some of the dismissal of the correlation might be due to bias (in the LW community generally, not you specifically) in favor of a hard foom. To me, if belief in a proposition in field X varies inversely with experience in field X... well all else equal that's grounds to give the proposition a bit more scrutiny.

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Inverse relationship between belief in foom and years worked in commercial software

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Inverse relationship between belief in foom and years worked in commercial software

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