alt Hacker NewsWhy is Zitron’s repute evaluated entirely on the basis of failed predictions? Predictions are incredibly hard. AI enthusiasts and thought leaders have made so many demonstrably incorrect predictions it’s hard to keep track. Based on this metric, Altman and Amodei should never be taken seriously again.
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What else would his repute be based on? Maybe telling retrospective truth? Per the article, he does terribly by that metric as well.
I thought in the post Ed was being evaluated based on all his predictions, and it turned out all of them were wrong.
Most people will read the post as going over all the falsifiable predictions and none of them panning out, since after the chronological prediction list it says "After this point, most further predictions that I saw were either non-falsifiable or resolve in the future".
If Dan is reading maybe he can clarify?
Have you ever listened to Zitron speak? He's not exactly the type to hedge his predictions behind careful language about how hard predictions are. He makes every one of these predictions with absolute confidence and conviction.
Years back John C. Dvorak talked about predictions. He's was being ridiculed for his comment that there was "no evidence that computer users would want to use a mouse" (which was sort of true at the time). One of his point was that he had made a crazy amount of predictions on various topics, some came true, many didn't. People just remember the one you got right, and the ones you got horribly wrong.
Ed Zitron is just one AI crash away from being known as the guy who saw this coming. Everything else he has said can be completely wrong, he just needs to be somewhat correct on a minor crash.