Ajeya Cotra

intellectually engaged, curious conversations with people across the full spectrum.

Why do you think it is that this disagreement is able to be maintained?

Murphy's law, because anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

I think this is our experience in our personal lives.

It's awfully hard to achieve things at work.

Things that to other people might seem so straightforward.

And they're like, why haven't you finished this yet?

And you're like, well, I could give you a very long list.

So that's the justification that they provide for their perspective in broad strokes.

But why is it that even after communicating this at great length to one another, they don't kind of converge on uncertainty or saying it'll be something in the middle because there's competing factors, that they just continue to be reasonably confident about quite different, I guess, narratives about how things will go?

So it's incredibly decision relevant to figure out who is right here.

I think like almost all of the parties to this conversation, if they completely changed their view and the people who thought it was going to be a thousand percent decided it was going to be 0.3%, they would probably change what they're working on.

Or they would think it was like a decisive consideration probably against everything that they were doing previously and vice versa.

If people came to think that there would be a thousand percent speed up, then they'd probably be a whole lot more nervous and interested in different kinds of projects.

So how can we potentially get more of a heads up ahead of time about which way things are going to go?

I guess it seems like

sharing theoretical arguments hasn't been persuasive to people.

Is there any empirics that we could collect as early as possible?

Yeah, is it possible to do this at the chip manufacturing level?

I guess maybe that's the most difficult manufacturing that there is more or less.