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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.
(Score: 4, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday July 08 2019, @06:22PM (1 child)
Not according to the Chicago Manual of Style [chicagomanualofstyle.org], which has always recommended NOT capitalizing or italicizing "The" or other articles before a periodical name. (Note that many publications, conforming to this style, also don't capitalize or italicize "the" before the Chicago Manual either, as I've done here.)
MLA changed its recommendation ONLY in 2016 to advocate including "The" in things like The New York Times or The New Yorker. Before that, it agreed with the Chicago Manual and most other style guides which are silent on the issue or just advocate a consistent approach. Given that some periodicals include "The" in the title and others do not, it's a pain in the neck to check for such things, hence the pragmatic approach.
Regardless, given how new this practice is even to many standard style guides, it's certainly not justified to put [sic] references all around. Sorry, but that's the worst kind of pedantic bullshit. I care about clarity of writing, conveying specific meaning, and hopefully connecting to an audience. Complaining about whether or not an article is capitalized goes into that bin of groundless pedantry like raging against split infinitives and prepositions at the end of sentences -- both practices that have VERY long histories in the English language and were only thought of as problematic when some overeducated Latin scholar tried to make English conform to Latin centuries later. Similarly, there's a long practice of pragmatic capitalization in titles, only recently beginning to shift as internet fact-checking makes the process of correcting such titles such easier. If you want to follow the newer standard because you think it's more accurate, fine -- I have no problem with it.
But let's not go around "correcting" people when they are following standard style guides, okay?
(And I do apologize for the tone of my post. But if there's one thing I can't stand for, it's self-righteous pedantry that speaks out of ignorance.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 09 2019, @12:24AM
tl;dr the[sic][sic]