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by frognumber 43 days ago
Be a Bayesian, and they'll stop annoying you.

If you have a 5% chance of thermonuclear war each decade for 10 decades, you'll:

- Hear similar annoying statements

- They'll be true

With AI, we don't know if it's one week or one decade. This means we should assign probabilities and consider all possibilities, not get annoyed.

1 comments

Assigning, and more specifically announcing/reporting on, all possibilities makes all of these predictions meaningless.

If I predict the world will end every single day from now until forever, I will most certainly be right eventually. That doesn’t make me an “expert” or someone worth listening to on the topic. That’s the playbook of a doomsday cult, not anyone that should drive world markets.

s/all possibilities/all possibilities with odds greater than some threshold/g

There's no reason to report on the odds of a meteor falling on my head tomorrow. There is every reason to consider the odds of:

- Nuclear apocalypse (esp. Cold War era)

- Bioweapon

- Climate change leading to disaster

- AI apocalypse

- Etc.

None of those are infinitesimal odds. That contrasts with, say, a zombie virus.