From: Ramez Naam (mez@apexnano.com)
Date: Tue Apr 29 2003 - 22:59:10 MDT
From: gts [mailto:gts_2000@yahoo.com]
> > So far in time, on this planet, the DA has been
> > wrong every single time it's been invoked.
>
> Really? Modern peoples have no evidence that DA is wrong. And
> moderns make up the vast majority of humans ever to have lived.
Perhaps I should say "every time it's been invoked and /tested/". In
ancient Rome, the doomsday argument would have seemed just as valid as
it does today. Yet it failed to predict a cataclysm.
To be even more clear, let's perform the following thought experiment.
Let's say mankind or our offspring lifeforms survive in the universe
for several trillion more years.
At every step along the way, the DA argument would seem true and at
almost all of those steps it would be wrong.
This just doesn't seem like a useful reasoning tool to me, except as a
warning against taking statistics too literally.
mez
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