Selection Effects in estimates of Global Catastrophic Risk

However, there's a problem - Eliezer is an expert on AI risk because he believes that AI risk is a bigger risk than nuclear war.

This isn't right. Eliezer got into the AI field because he wanted to make a Singularity happen sooner, and only later determined that AI risk is high. Even if Eliezer thought that nuclear war is a bigger risk than AI, he would still be in AI, because he would be thinking that creating a Singularity ASAP is the best way to prevent nuclear war.

Is there a sensible way for these people to correct for the fact that the people studying these risks are those that have high estimate of them in the first place?

I suggest that if you have the ability to evaluate the arguments on an object level, then do that, otherwise try to estimate P(E|H1) and P(E|H2) where E is the evidence you see and H1 is the "low risk" hypothesis (i.e., AI risk is actually low), H2 is the "high risk" hypothesis, and apply Bayes' rule.

Here's a simple argument for high AI risk. "AI is safe" implies that either superintelligence can't be created by humans, or any superintelligence we do create will somehow converge to a "correct" or "human-friendly" morality. Either of these may turn out to be true, but it's hard to see how anyone could (justifiably) have high confidence in either of them at this point in our state of knowledge.

As for P(E|H1) and P(E|H2), I think it's likely that even if AI risk is actually low, there would be someone in the world trying to make a living out of "crying wolf" about AI risk, so that alone (i.e., an apparent expert warning about AI risk) doesn't increase the posterior probability of H2 much. But what would be the likelihood of that person also creating a rationalist community and trying to "raise the sanity waterline"?

I think people should discount risk estimates fairly heavily when an organisation is based around doom mongering. For instance, The Singularity Institute, The Future of Humanity Institute and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists all seem pretty heavily oriented around doom. Such organisations initially attract those with high risk estimates, and they then actively try and "sell" their estimates to others.

Obtaining less biased estimates seems rather challenging. The end of the would would obviously be an unprecidented event.

The usual way of eliciting probability is with bets. However, with an apocalypse, this doesn't work too well. Attempts to use bets have some serious problems.

I don't see a special problem...evaluate the arguments, try to correct for biases. Business as usual. Or do you suspect there is a new type of bias at work here?

One way of testing this is to whether people are willing to discuss existential risk threats that cannot be solved by giving them money. Such comments do exist (see for example Stephen Hawking's comments about the danger of aliens). It is however interesting to note that he's made similar remarks about the threat of AI. (See e.g. here). I'm not sure whether such evaluations are relevant.

Also, I don't think it follows that people like Yudkowsky and Hellman necessarily decide to study the existential risks they do because they have a higher than average estimate for the threats in question. They may just have internalized the threats more. Most humans simply don't internalize the risks of existential risk in a way that alters their actions, even if they are willing to acknowledge high probabilities of problems.

People who work for http://nuclearrisk.org/ have a very high estimate of the probability that a nuclear war will destroy the world (by their estimates, if you are American and under 40, then nuclear war is the single most likely way in which you might die next year).

Nuclear weapons have been available on the "black market" (thanks to sloppy soviet handling practices) for decades, yet no terrorist or criminal group has ever used a nuclear fission initiation device. Nuclearrisk.org claims "terrorists may soon get their own button on the vest", citing Al-Qaeda's open desire to acquire nuclear weapons.

I am unable, if I assume fully honest and rational assessments, to rectify these points of fact with one another. They disagree with each other. Given the fact that, furthermore, many of these assessments of risk seem to carry the implicit assumption that if a single nuke is used, the whole world will start glowing in the dark ( see: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/july22/hellman-nuclear-analysis-071709.html for an example of this (Martin Hellman himself) ) -- well, it gets further absurd.

In other words; folks need to be careful, when crafting expert opinions, to avoid Déformation professionnelle.

Risk mitigation groups would gain some credibility by publishing concrete probability estimates of "the world will be destroyed by X before 2020" (and similar for other years). As many of the risks are a rather short event (think nuclear war / asteroid strike / singularity), the world will be destroyed by a single cause and the respective probabilities can be summed. I would not be surprised if the total probability comes out well above 1. Has anybody ever compiled a list of separate estimates?

On a related note, how much of the SIAI is financed on credit? Any group which estimates high risks of disastrous events should be willing to pay higher interest rates than market average. (As the expected amount of repayments is reduced by the nontrivial probability of everyone dying before maturity of the contract).

So you more highly value your immediate personal comfort than you do the long-term survival of the human race?

I don't care at all about the long-term survival of the human race. Is there any reason I should? I care about the short-term survival of humanity but only because it affects me and other people that I care about. But going to prison would also affect me and the people I care about so it would be a big deal. At least like 25% as bad as the end of humanity.

I suspect what you lack is imagination and determination.

Certainly that is true in this case. I'm not going to put a lot of work into developing an elaborate plan to do something that I don't think should be done.

"because Eliezer is probably the world expert on AI risk"

There is no experts on the AI risk. There's nothing where to get expertise from. He read some SF, got caught on an idea, did not study (self study or otherwise) CS or any actual relevant body of knowledge to the point of producing anything useful, and he is a very convincing writer. The experts, you'll get experts in 2050. He's a dilettante.

People follow some sort of distribution on their risk estimates. Eliezer is just the far far off end of the bell curve on the risk estimate for AI, among those with writing skills. He does make some interesting points, but he's not a risk estimator.

It seems like it might be a good idea to know what the probability of each of these risks is.

I think you need to consider this point further. Before you go through the effort of estimating a probability it is good to know if there is any value to such an estimate. For instance, if you did a lot of work and figured out that the prob that the world would be destroyed by UFAI was 5% would that change your behavior in any way? What if you found it to be 50% or .000005%? Personally, I don't think I would do much differently. Maybe in the 50% case I would vote for the mass murder of all AI researchers but currently I don't know of any major political candidates with that in their platform. Other than that it seems like pretty useless information to me.

That would require that I had asserted I agreed with the underlying premise that UFAI was a significant risk.

At the moment, I do not.

I also find it rather unsurprising that the comment in question has been as far down-voted as it has been, though once again I am left noting how while I am not surprised, I am disappointed with LW in general. This is happening too often, I fear.