Crossposted to the EA Forum.

In October 2022, 91 EA Forum/LessWrong users answered the AI timelines deference survey. This post summarises the results.

Context

The survey was advertised in this forum post, and anyone could respond. Respondents were asked to whom they defer most, second-most and third-most, on AI timelines. You can see the survey here.

Results

This spreadsheet has the raw anonymised survey results. Here are some plots which try to summarise them.^[1]

Simply tallying up the number of times that each person is deferred to:

The plot only features people who were deferred to by at least two respondents.^[2]

Some basic observations:

Overall, respondents defer most frequently to themselves—i.e. their “inside view” or independent impression—and Ajeya Cotra. These two responses were each at least twice as frequent as any other response.
Then there’s a kind of “middle cluster”—featuring Daniel Kokotajlo, Paul Christiano, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Holden Karnofsky—where, again, each of these responses were ~at least twice as frequent as any other response.
Then comes everyone else…^[3] There’s probably something more fine-grained to be said here, but it doesn’t seem crucial to understanding the overall picture.

What happens if you redo the plot with a different metric? How sensitive are the results to that?

One thing we tried was computing a “weighted” score for each person, by giving them:

3 points for each respondent who defers to them the most
2 points for each respondent who defers to them second-most
1 point for each respondent who defers to them third-most.

If you redo the plot with that score, you get this plot. The ordering changes a bit, but I don’t think it really changes the high-level picture. In particular, the basic observations in the previous section still hold.

We think the weighted score (described in this section) and unweighted score (described in the previous section) are the two most natural metrics, so we didn’t try out any others.

Don’t some people have highly correlated views? What happens if you cluster those together?

Yeah, we do think some people have highly correlated views, in the sense that their views depend on similar assumptions or arguments. We tried plotting the results using the following basic clusters:

Open Philanthropy^[4] cluster = {Ajeya Cotra, Holden Karnofsky, Paul Christiano, Bioanchors}
MIRI

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