Timothy B. Lee is a reporter who writes about AI, economics, and other things.
https://twitter.com/binarybits
https://substack.com/@timothyblee
https://www.understandingai.org/
https://www.vox.com/authors/timothy-b-lee
https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/
Most of his work is high quality and informative, and he seems to have a solid understanding of economics and the tech world in general. The exception is any time he writes about AI risk; his articles on that subject tend to contain a lot of fallacious reasoning, indicating a lack of understanding of probability theory and risk management.
He's very open to discussion on this point, as you can see from e.g. the comments on this post. He even reached out to me via email after one of the comments I made in order to continue the discussion more directly. Unfortunately, neither of us has changed their mind on anything substantive so far.
Timothy has a large audience of 10,000+ people and is pretty well known in the tech world, so changing his mind on this subject would be a big win for AI safety, and would easily be worth the time. Conversely, I'm quite concerned about AI, and 100 hours is a minuscule price to pay for the peace of mind that would accompany having a worldview like Timothy's.
If I decide that it's not worth continuing to argue with him, this market resolves N/A. If I decide that it is worth continuing to argue with him, then I commit to spend at least 100 hours doing so (if he's open to that much discussion; I'm not going to harass him), and this market resolves to whether the discussion was productive. If either of us changes their mind in a serious way, it resolves YES, otherwise it resolves NO.
If one of us changes their mind for a reason that's clearly unrelated to our discussion, that doesn't count and the market still resolves NO. But if it's unclear why the mind was changed and it's at least plausible that it was partially due to the discussion, that's good enough and this will resolve YES. (For example, if Timothy posts an article that says he's concerned about the risks and doesn't mention any particular person that changed his mind, that would resolve YES.)
The time limit for evidence is 3 months after the 100 hours is up. If I haven't changed my mind and no evidence has emerged of him changing his within that time frame, it resolves NO.
1,000