RE: my objection to the Doomsday argument

From: Ramez Naam (mez@apexnano.com)
Date: Fri Apr 25 2003 - 18:51:52 MDT

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    From: gts [mailto:gts_2000@yahoo.com]
    > You must, at least according to DA theory, accept that
    > you, Ramez Naam of 2003, are a single random sample taken
    > from the population of all humans ever to live past or present.

    Why should I accept that I'm a random sample taken from the population
    of all humans ever to live past or present? I see no justification
    for that.

    I posited a very concrete test of the DA - if we apply it
    retroactively to the past, does it have any predictive power? The
    answer is no.

    From an epistemological standpoint, it's hard for me to accept that a
    more abstract argument should have precedence over my more concrete
    test.

    Let me put it more formally. A good hypothesis is falsifiable. So
    how would we falsify the Doomsday Argument? Wait some arbitrary
    period of time to see if the world really ends? How long would we
    have to wait before deciding that it's moot? 1 day? 1 year? 1
    billion years? The argument itself is independent of timescale, so
    there's no formal logical reason for it to be more or less valid after
    the accumulation of another billion years of data against it.

    On the other hand, from a Bayesian standpoint, every instance of the
    DA failing to predict reality is evidence against the DA. If we roll
    back time and start applying the DA from the first origin of life on
    earth, we see it fail time and time again, so I would think that a
    good Bayesian would reject the DA.

    To me, all of this is evidence that DA is not a useful thought
    experiment, except perhaps as an example of how statistics can be
    misused.

    mez



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