Haha! You're right, I spoke too soon. The graph Katja used is the exact same graph used to explain Berkson's paradox and the pattern match hit me so hard I couldn't resist commenting. Lesson learned: think about it for 5 minutes before commenting.
Katja's phenomenon (KP) is not an instance of Berkson's paradox (BP) but I can see how they would often go together. Imagine that you go down a street and pick up everyone who is particularly tastefully dressed. In this group rich people will be overrepresented simply because they more ea
It's called Berkson's paradox and it can be used to explain all kinds of real life observations like "why are all the handsome men I date such jerks" (http://www.slate.com/blogs/how_not_to_be_wrong/2014/06/03/berkson_s_fallacy_why_are_handsome_men_such_jerks.html) or why google discovered that being good at programming competitions negatively correlated with being good at the job.
I feel like this and many other arguments for AI-skepticism are implicitly assuming AGI that is amazingly dumb and then proving that there is no need to worry about this dumb superintelligence.
Remember the old "AI will never beat humans at every task because there isn't one architecture that is optimal at every task. An AI optimised to play chess won't be great at trading stocks (or whatever) and vice versa"? Well, I'm capable of running a different program on my computer depending on the task at hand. If your AGI can't do the
The main thing that would predict slower takeoff is if early AGI systems turn out to be extremely computationally expensive. The MIRI people I've talked to about this are actually skeptical b