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posted by martyb on Monday July 08 2019, @11:58AM   Printer-friendly
from the I've-still-got-plenty-of-time dept.

A math equation that predicts the end of humanity:

The most mind-boggling controversy in the contemporary philosophy of science is the "doomsday argument," a claim that a mathematical formula can predict how long the human race will survive. It gives us even odds that our species will meet its end within the next 760 years.

The doomsday argument doesn't tell what's going to kill us — it just gives the date (very, very approximately).

Yet, I [William Poundstone] now believe the doomsday prediction merits serious attention — I've written my latest book about it. Start with J. Richard Gott III. He's a Princeton astrophysicist, one of several scholars who independently formulated the doomsday argument in the last decades of the 20th century. (Others are physicists Holger Bech Nielsen and Brandon Carter and philosopher John Leslie.) In 1969, Gott was a physics undergraduate fresh out of Harvard, spending the summer in Europe. At a visit to the Berlin Wall, he did a quick calculation and announced to a friend: The Berlin Wall will stand at least 2 and 2/3 more years but no more than 24 more years.

Demolition on the wall began 21 years later. This motivated Gott to write his method up. He published it in the journal Nature in 1993. There, Gott wrote of the future of humanity itself. He forecast a 95 percent chance that the human race would cease to exist within 12 to 18,000 years.

Not all Nature readers were convinced. "'There are lies, damn lies and statistics' is one of those colourful phrases that bedevil poor workaday statisticians," biostatistician Steven N. Goodman complained in a letter to Nature. "In my view, the statistical methodology of Gott ... breathes unfortunate new life into the saying."

Yet Gott and his predictions also received favorable attention in the[sic] New York Times[*] and the[sic] New Yorker[*] (where a profile of Gott was titled "How to Predict Everything"). Gott is an engaging storyteller with a Kentucky accent that's survived decades in the Ivy League. He has become a sort of scientific soothsayer, successfully predicting the runs of Broadway plays and when the Chicago White Sox would again win the World Series (they did in 2005).

Can it really be that easy to predict "everything"? It quickly became clear that 1) most scholars believe the doomsday argument is wrong, and 2) there is no consensus on why it's wrong. To this day, Gott's method, and a related one developed by Carter and Leslie, inspire a lively stream of journal articles.

You can read more about the doomsday debate on Quora

[*] The name of these publications do include the word "the" and should, therefore, be capitalized: The New York Times and The New Yorker, respectively.


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  • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 08 2019, @01:14PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 08 2019, @01:14PM (#864454)

    Gott is just an amateur psychohistorian, barely takes any variables into account.
    Seldon was the true master.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 08 2019, @01:17PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 08 2019, @01:17PM (#864457)

    Shirley you mean Sheldon Cooper. Who TF knows nowadays who that Seldon is supposed to be?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 08 2019, @03:45PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 08 2019, @03:45PM (#864536)

      foundation series by asimov, i think.
      also what about the other 1000 gott like people standing in front of the berlin and whos predictions were wrong?
      nobody talks about them ... in any case theres a 50-50 per cent chance someone alive today will predict the exact date humankind will demise just right, non? the question then is, would it happen if no one knows of this prediction and it is kept secret?

    • (Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 08 2019, @03:54PM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 08 2019, @03:54PM (#864542)

      >> Who TF knows nowadays who that Seldon is supposed to be?

      I would Hari a guess at >80% of this site's readers.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 08 2019, @09:18PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 08 2019, @09:18PM (#864703)

        >81% guess from me!

      • (Score: 4, Funny) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday July 08 2019, @10:08PM (1 child)

        by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Monday July 08 2019, @10:08PM (#864724) Journal

        No, the range is 0%. There is only a finite number of people who will have ever read Asimov or heard of Seldon, and over an infinite time range the ratio of those who have been exposed to those who haven't can therefore only climb. My logic is about as good as Gott's here, so I feel 95% confident that the actual number is 0.

        :P

        --
        This sig for rent.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 09 2019, @04:25AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 09 2019, @04:25AM (#864854)

          But if the chance of reading Asimov in any one year is non-zero, which it must be because some people have read Asimov, then over an infinite time range the probability of reading Asimov must approach 1.
          Therefore, my logic being at least as good as either Gott's or AYLABTU's, I feel confident that the actual number is 100%