Dwarkesh

We don't have to guess about aggregate opinion.

We can look at Metaculous.

Metaculous, I think their timeline was 2040 back... No, it was like 2050 back in 2020.

It gradually went down to like 2040, two or three years ago.

Now it's at 2030, so it's barely ahead of us.

Again, that may turn out to be wrong, but it does look like the Metaculans overall have been...

too pessimistic, thinking too long-term rather than too optimistic.

And I think that's like the closest thing we have to a neutral aggregator where we're not cherry-picking things.

Yeah, and then the example I gave was that humans also can't do this.

So for me, the...

Most salient example is etymology of words.

We have all of these words in English that are very similar, like happy versus hapless, happen, perhaps.

And we never think about them unless you read an etymology dictionary and then, oh, obviously these all come from some old root that has to mean luck or occurrence or something like that.

So, like, it...

It's kind of about figuring out versus checking.

If I tell you those, you're like, this seems plausible.

And of course, in etymology, there are also a lot of false friends where they seem plausible but aren't connected.

But you really do have to have somebody shove it in your face before you start thinking about it and make all of those connections.

Yeah, so to me, it doesn't seem like he is just kind of sitting there being logically omniscient and getting the answer.

It seems like he's a genius.