From: Ramez Naam (mez@apexnano.com)
Date: Fri Apr 25 2003 - 15:40:48 MDT
I have a basic rebuttal to the Doomsday argument.
The Doomsday argument makes exactly as much sense now as it would have
at any past point on Earth. Yet it appears to have been wrong at all
of those past points. This casts rather a bit of doubt on its
predictive power.
Indeed, in any civilization, the Doomsday argument must always seem
valid. There is no amount of information that a member of a
civilization can possess which will differentiate those times when
such a statistical argument is valid from when it's invalid.
So in short, given that it the argument will be wrong the vast
majority of the time it's used, and /has/ been wrong over the entire
history of life on this planet, I see no reason to believe that it's
correct now.
Is there a flaw in my reasoning?
mez
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