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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) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday July 08 2019, @02:53PM

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Monday July 08 2019, @02:53PM (#864508) Journal

    As far as I can tell from TFA, Gott simply pulls a number out of his ass for multiples of time that the wall would exist and then thinks that by dropping an area bar and taking a fraction of it that would be the confidence interval of his prediction. Now he can do the same thing for the existence of humanity or the universe or whatever: Just pull an upper limit number out of his butt. As far as what I know from actual statistics: Complete horseshit. I am 95% sure that I will go have a cup of real manure sometime between 5 minutes from now and 6PM. I have a cup that I often drink from and horseshit exists and there must be some way I could be exposed to it, and it is reasonable that the interval should be sometime between now and 6 PM. So if it comes true then I was right, amazing! And if I'm wrong, well that was just the 5% chance that I might not do that because.... well 5% is such a great sounding number and is used elsewhere in statistics in a completely different way. (Just ignore that the event is not something subject to a normal distribution, mmmmkay?)

    OK. I'm off to have my coffee now. Or will it be horseshit?

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