RE: my objection to the Doomsday argument

From: Ramez Naam (mez@apexnano.com)
Date: Tue Apr 29 2003 - 12:39:44 MDT

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    George Dvorsky wrote:

    > Bostrom uses a great analogy, that of the ball dispensing
    machine(1).
    > You know you have two machines: one that dispenses 10 balls, and one

    > that dispenses 1 million balls, but you don't know which one is
    which.
    > Each ball is numbered. You pull a ball from one of them, and you get

    > the number 4. Any reasonable person would therefore assume that they

    > pulled the ball from the 10-ball machine.

    This analogy breaks down from the viewpoint of the balls. If you're a
    ball, and you see that you have a #4 painted on you, then it may seem
    to you that there's a 50% chance that you're from the machine with 10
    balls and a 50% chance that you're from the machine with 1 million
    balls. After all, you're one of two such balls, and you have no
    information that suggests you're from one machine or the other (you
    can never see balls that come later in number than you).

    > This same reasoning is what drives the doomsday argument. Thus, as
    > rational people, we should *expect* that we, as the 106th billion
    > persons, are ball #4; it's far less likely that we're 106th billion
    > out of 106 trillion than 106th billion out of 200 billion.

    This assumes that we know something of the distribution of total
    lifetime populations of civilizations. We don't.



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