Checking Kurzweil's track record

I don't think it's true. I think it would be pretty easy to survey people and include some questions checking for technological awareness and Kurzweil awareness, and quietly discarding any results from people low on the former or high on the latter.

I mean, you could do it on Amazon Mechanical Turk! Such people are pretty technically sophisticated to be on Mechanical Turk in the first place, psychologists use it for surveys all the time, and a dismayingly large fraction of Turkers have college educations. It'd work fine.

I'm likewise vaguely aware of Kurzweil's reputation and accomplishments, and vaguely recall mention of a big prediction in the field of AI, a very optimistic one according to critics IIRC.

That's about the extent of it. I wasn't aware he had publicly made other predictions.

Problem is, how would one go about verifying this? Not to mention that if I wasn't already primed to not click the link, I would probably have immediately searched for the predictions in question just to know the subject under discussion.

On that note, thanks and good move Stuart, warning us beforehand about the spoiler/unblinding link.

I doubt it's true. I think it would be relatively easy to find technically sophisticated people who're unaware of Kurzweil's specific predictions; it'd be harder to find technically sophisticated people who're consistently unaware of his general thesis, but I'll bet you could still do it. You'd just need to look outside the transhumanist/singularitarian/AI enthusiast cluster.

Since those clusters are pretty tightly grouped in terms of conceptual underpinnings, it should be easy to filter them from a sample. Getting a good sample would be harder -- LW wouldn't do it, and personal blogs wouldn't either. Gwern's idea below looks promising but I have no idea how you'd go about it.

Interesting. My feeling was that it was hard to conceal that it was Kurzweil, and that people would certainly see that it was Kurzweil while googling their answers (also, we would get more interest with a semi-famous name).

Thanks!

Thanks!

Cheers!

previously read your previous post with the randomly selected predictions, which hopefully isn't disqualifying.

Fine as long as you try and ignore them :-)

Thanks!

Cheers!

Thanks!

Cool, thanks!

Cheers!

Interestingly, Stuart seems to have adopted a similar approach to the synagogue described in Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate, with people publicly declaring their commitments.

I wish I could take credit for that level of machiavellianism...

Cheers! There will be partial correct/incorrect scores available as well.

Thanks! I'll think about the error checking process; certainly there is some possibility for factual errors, but most of the work is in interpreting qualifiers like "ubiquitous" and "most" and mapping that to what happened in the world.

Thanks!

Thanks!

Thanks!

Cool, thanks!

Cheers!

Update: I've done 20 predictions. Not that tedious, kinda interesting actually.

Thanks!

The questions will be grouped together (they are constructed grammatically so that they follow on from each other), so you'll generally treating 4-5 questions as a single block. It took me a a few hours to do my research; I did ten blocks, which I think were about 20-30 predictions.

We'll ask about their familiarity with Kurzweil in general - but remember that the volunteers are going to do research on the questions, so it's very likely they'll realise it's Kurzweil at that point.