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XiXiDu comments on Intelligence Explosion analysis draft: introduction - Less Wrong Discussion
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If you read a thousand classic science fiction books, one of them will have made a somewhat accurate prediction about the future. That Leo Szilard or Svante Arrhenius turned out to be right doesn't mean that we can usefully reason about the future. You have to actually show that, without hindsight bias, there have been people capable of predicting their success in predicting the future and not cherry pick some successful examples under millions of unsuccessful ones.
I thought of this as well, and I also thought that this is not a good criticism, because this introduction explicitly poses the question of what those Szilards and Arrheniuses did right, and what others did wrong. It is implicit, though not obvious, that such questions may result in the answer, "They did nothing better than anyone else; but they were lucky," though I do not actually suspect this to be the case. Perhaps it could be made explicit.