Science and speculation - by Ajeya Cotra

Will we agree about AI risks in time?

Science is a social institution like the judicial system. Just like courts make you throw out perfectly good Bayesian evidence like whether the defendant seems like a shifty guy to you or rumors you heard about his whereabouts,1 the scientific process has epistemically conservative norms about what kinds of evidence and arguments are admissible. This means that the process of science gets to the truth much slower than a perfectly rational Bayesian should, and indeed much slower than many particular farseeing individuals actually did. Svante Arrhenius made the first estimate of global warming…

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