In 1972, the Nobel prize-winning physicist Philip Anderson wrote the essay "More Is Different". In it, he argues that quantitative changes can lead to qualitatively different and unexpected phenomena. While he
Machine learning is touching increasingly many aspects of our society, and its effect will only continue to grow. Given this, I and many others care about risks from future ML systems and how
The previous post started forecasting the UK hospital peak (based on information through Dec. 21, 2021). We generated several considerations and ultimately focused on the Omicron doubling time, the peak number of cases,
So far, we've focused on individual skills involved in a forecast: extrapolating trends, employing reference classes, how to combine estimates, and thinking about alternatives. Next I want to turn to integrating these, and
For this post, I commissioned Misha Yagudin, a top-ranked forecaster, to provide feedback and commentary. I include selected comments as quotes throughout. For open-ended questions, it's easy to underestimate the number of plausible