Re: poly: The singleton hypothesis

 hanson@econ.berkeley.edu (Robin Hanson) writes:
>Peter M. writes:
>> I see a remarkable lack of consensus. I think if you could quantify
>>people's predictions for the time between the first nanotech product
>>and the time when nanotech has caused economic growth of 2 or 3 orders
>>of magnitude, you'd see a rather flat, uniform distribution ranging from
>>hours to centuries when it seems like there ought to be something like
>>a bell curve. I think the illusion of a group of singularity worshipers
>>all thinking the same things comes from imprecise communications.
>
>Do you mean uniform across time, or across the logarithm of time?
>If the latter, that seems to describe a consensus in support of Nick's
>claim. A century is ~10^6 hours, while a year is ~10^4 hours. So with
>a uniform distribution across log time, with bounds x hours and x
>centuries, the claim that the time is < x years agrees with 2/3 of the
>estimates.

 I confess I wasn't thinking very precisely, and was using something
in between a log and a linear time axis.
 Using a log time axis is probably the only good way to look at it,
and when I try to do that I think it declines significantly below
something like a week or a day, and the overall shape is probably more
like a bell curve with an rather broad, flat top.

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