Holden Karnofsky: belief

Transcript context

…One thing you just said a minute ago was that we are better at making predictions than people in the past were. So that alone should make us more optimistic about what we need to predict in the future. It's just a guess. I mean this is what society is. We have had a lot of progress on all kinds of intellectual fronts. I think there has been a lot of progress on what it looks like to make good, reasonable predictions about the future. I think that's something that's happened. So I think we should be expecting ourselves to do a bit better than people did in the past and future people will probably do better than we do. Right. When I look at a report like Biological Anchors, I often wonder whether Asimov is just shooting the shit about screens and what you're able to do with them. Maybe he had less sources of error than this eight-step methodology where you might not even be aware that there's a ninth or tenth missing step that might make the whole thing invalid, and where many of the inputs have multiple orders of magnitude, wide confidence intervals. What do you think of that general skepticism?…

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