>Perhaps there's some level of overconfidence at play from systems thinkers who overintellectualize their ability to conceptualize and extrapolate forward an im

>Perhaps there's some level of overconfidence at play from systems thinkers who overintellectualize their ability to conceptualize and extrapolate forward an impossibly complex system. Actually this is more or less the point that Eliezer Yudkowsky makes in this essay about the need for caution in AI development: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/03/so_far_unfriend.html https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/03/so_far_unfriend.htm... (see especially points A/B/C/D) I doubt overconfidence is a problem specific to effective altruism. In any case, any good machine learning engineer knows that a dataset with only a single data point is essentially worthless -- even if we grant the premise that the board took the wrong action given the information they had available to them at the time.