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