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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: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Monday July 08 2019, @06:05PM (11 children)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 08 2019, @06:05PM (#864609) Journal

    That's a lot of words to arrive at some very suspect conclusion.

    Yes, it's a hypernaive statistical method. But if you were trying to estimate the duration of a random event, strictly based on one piece of evidence(how long since the same single event started), this is the correct method to do so. And 50% is the chance that it's on the left side of that curve.

    I don't think it's fair to say that's the only piece of information we have, but the methodology is correct.

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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday July 08 2019, @06:35PM (4 children)

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Monday July 08 2019, @06:35PM (#864626) Journal

    Yes, it's a hypernaive statistical method.

    That's an understatement.

    But if you were trying to estimate the duration of a random event, strictly based on one piece of evidence(how long since the same single event started), this is the correct method to do so.

    Extrapolation based on a single data point is stupid and generally meaningless with no other information given. Calling any method based on that "correct" is naive.

    And 50% is the chance that it's on the left side of that curve.

    As I said, I have a simple methodology that is 100% accurate, according to that evaluation. Please re-read my post and address that point if you want to argue this seriously.

    I don't think it's fair to say that's the only piece of information we have

    It's NOT the only piece of information we have about human civilization (and arguably we DON'T have even that data point, since it depends on your definition of "beginning of human civilization"), but it seems to be the way the author's statistical methodology claims to work.

    but the methodology is correct.

    Assuming a whole truckload of assumptions (about evenness of temporal distribution, the fact that we are supposedly making a prediction at a "random" point among that temporal distribution, etc.) that we have no justification in assuming.

    Again, I have a method that works 100% of the time. The author's "method" is only meaningful if it actually excludes "silly" answers. It does not, a large percentage of the time. So, it's not a whole lot better than my 100% accurate method.

    • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday July 08 2019, @07:34PM (1 child)

      by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 08 2019, @07:34PM (#864656) Journal

      Yeah, I guess I appreciate all that.

      The problem is trying to outdo the doomsday argument with is a bit like trying fill out the drake equation. You can stick some assumptions in there, but really, you don't know what it takes to start or stop another civilization. Not really.

      Other discussions I'm having today make me long for a very short remainder of humanity.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 09 2019, @03:06AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 09 2019, @03:06AM (#864835)

        dP/dT = ( P )*( 1 - P )

    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 09 2019, @09:15AM (1 child)

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday July 09 2019, @09:15AM (#864910) Homepage
      His method is the equivalent of getting to a bus stop, asking a geezer on the bench when the last one was (and getting a numeric answer), not looking at the timetable, and guessing when the next one will be with an attitide towards accuracy similar to someone saying "the next roll of the roulette wheel won't be a 0 or a 00".

      I did once run an online quiz based on the identical principle, when the maths wasn't widely known. You arrive in a new town, and you see buses numbered X. On the assumption that all routes are contiguously numbered, how many routes do you think the town has? The optimal strategy seemed to be to just guess that you've seen one(s) in the middle. Number of seen bus route = time since start of humanity; highest bus number = length of humanity's existence. You can make it more interesting in the bus version by seeing two buses, or even three. (I found out later that this has been applied to chassis numbers on enemy tanks during wars, google/wikipedia is your friend.)
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
      • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday July 10 2019, @01:52AM

        by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Wednesday July 10 2019, @01:52AM (#865257) Journal

        Thanks. Yes, I was familiar with this sort of estimation method before I read the article here. I've just never seen it applied to something so important or taken so seriously. (My first post explained it in more detail both to familiarize people here who might not have heard or it or read TFA, as well as to set up why the method isn't that useful when accuracy matters.)

  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday July 08 2019, @07:02PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Monday July 08 2019, @07:02PM (#864637) Journal

    Also, just to be clear -- I was not at ALL trying to pick a fight with you in my initial post on this thread. If anything, I was trying to add a more subtle criticism to the list of qualifications for this theory you already started. I only posted it below yours as it seemed one of the most appropriate places among the posts already here.

  • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday July 08 2019, @08:21PM (4 children)

    by aristarchus (2645) on Monday July 08 2019, @08:21PM (#864679) Journal

    Come now! The prediction is based on the fact that humanity exists. The probability of the existence of humanity is therefore 1. The probability of humanity ceasing to exist, if humanity did not exist, =0. Therefore, the probability of humanity ending, once it in fact exists, is >0. This is such a profound conclusion that it behooves the theorist to choose some random value greater than zero, to make it appear to be non-vacuous. The real difficulty is that zero is greater than zero, when we are dealing with probability, since impossible means zero possibility, but not impossible does not mean actual possibility.
    Or, in Modal logic notation
    ◊A = ∼◻∼A
    but
    ∼◻∼A ≠ ◊∼A

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Monday July 08 2019, @08:33PM (3 children)

      by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 08 2019, @08:33PM (#864687) Journal

      Uh... We're not proving civilization doesn't exist or is possible to exist. We're discussing entirely hypothetical ways of estimating black swan events. Or broadly the durability of civilization. Like in a very informal sense those relate to existence in a pretty intuitive way. But in a strict syllogistic sense... they're very disconnected.

      Given that, that symbolic logic doesn't help much. It sheds light on the wrong question?

      • (Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday July 08 2019, @09:47PM (2 children)

        by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Monday July 08 2019, @09:47PM (#864717)

        Are we actually agreed that civilisation does exist though?

        • (Score: 4, Funny) by ikanreed on Monday July 08 2019, @11:28PM (1 child)

          by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 08 2019, @11:28PM (#864754) Journal

          They made 6 games in the series. Unquestionable.

          • (Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday July 09 2019, @12:21AM

            by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Tuesday July 09 2019, @12:21AM (#864780)

            Your slanderous tongue will make it all the more satisfying when I stand before the ruins of your capital!