Hal Finney wrote: <hal@rain.org>
> Doug Bailey, <Doug.Bailey@ey.com>, writes:
I think Hal explains it very well. I just want to add that if we try to apply the DA to other classes of objects we have to be careful. (Astrophysicist Richard Gott, who independently discovered the doomsday argument, calls this general argument form 'the delta t argument'.) We have to make sure that we are not neglecting some underlying correlation. For example, when I explained the DA to one friend, he asked: "So I should expect that that tree over there will live approximately as long as it has already lived?" Well, that doesn't follow. The reason that tree was selected was that it was big and salient. The young trees in the garden did not have the same chance of being selected.