11–20 of 58 posts
The Doomsday Argument is not an argument in favor of its conclusion -- it's a reductio ad absurdum that demonstrates why this type of reasoning is invalid.
Other than the fact that you can't coherently reason based on your own existence (existence is not a predicate), one should rightfully be wary of an argument that would have been valid and false at every point in the past. The Doomsday Argument is not an argument in favor of its conclusion -- it's a reductio ad absurdum that demonstrates why this type of reasoning is invalid.
>Now we modify the thought experiment a bit. We still have the hundred cubicles but this time they are not painted blue or red. Instead they are numbered from 1 to 100. The numbers are painted on the outside. Then a fair coin is tossed (by God perhaps). If the coin falls heads, one person is created in each cubicle. If the coin falls tails, then persons are only created in cubicles 1 through 10. >You find yourself in…
No. That you are in a cubicle is a given fact, so the probability that you find yourself in a cubicle is unconditionally 1.
You are in one of the rooms, open your eyes and see that there is no gold and ponies around. You take a look at your room number and see 7. Then you know that best decision is to operate on assumption that there is 91% chance that only 10 rooms were stripped of gold and ponies. So lots of gold and ponies should await you very soon as you move to further rooms of increasing numbers.
Reassured with that bulletproof argument we may look into the future with hope that rather sooner than later there will be times where we won't be confined to this dull rock we evolved on, to this lame rapidly decaying bodies with machines that push those clunky electrons around that can barely add 0 to 1 while overheating immensely.
Because near future is (likely) full of gold and ponies.
I hope this illustrates why purely philosophical arguments are empty of any utility. If you reason without experimental data to anchor your reasoning to something real you end up with reasoning that works just as well when applied to the thing you had in mind when it wandered as to thing opposite to your intention giving opposite conclusions and teaching us absolutely nothing about world.
Ah. First two dowvotes and no comment from fans of realworld importance of philosophy in this day and age. How classy!
Is there a strong, formal version of the Doomsday argument not based on cubicles and such? The obvious flaw in that version is that it is based on finite possibilities: that is, finding oneself in this or that kind of universe out of so many possible ones. For starters, we have no idea of how likely our universe is; we know what numerator is 1, but what goes on the denominator? Is there even such a number? If so it i…
The big gaping hole I see is that the blog post at least doesn't treat the earlier epochs with the same question. If a person in 1000 CE took up the same question, would they predict Doom Early or Doom Late? If everyone for the last ten thousand years would predict Doom Early, that seems like a piss poor predictor.
Is there a strong, formal version of the Doomsday argument not based on cubicles and such? The obvious flaw in that version is that it is based on finite possibilities: that is, finding oneself in this or that kind of universe out of so many possible ones. For starters, we have no idea of how likely our universe is; we know what numerator is 1, but what goes on the denominator? Is there even such a number? If so it i…
The big gaping hole I see is that the blog post at least doesn't treat the earlier epochs with the same question. If a person in 1000 CE took up the same question, would they predict Doom Early or Doom Late? If everyone for the last ten thousand years would predict Doom Early, that seems like a piss poor predictor.
Other than the fact that you can't coherently reason based on your own existence (existence is not a predicate), one should rightfully be wary of an argument that would have been valid and false at every point in the past. The Doomsday Argument is not an argument in favor of its conclusion -- it's a reductio ad absurdum that demonstrates why this type of reasoning is invalid.
Is this not a weakness in many (all?) deductive arguments? i.e. if we throw out this argument then we have to throw out much of science.
Imagine that the coin that we're flipping isn't fair, and comes up heads with prior probability p. Further, suppose that the ratio between the small population and the large population is R (in the article this is R = 10 / 100 = .1). In this situation, upon discovering that you're inside the small population, the posterior probability of heads ends up as
p / (R - p * (1 - R))
Thus, the real fallacy in the argument is that the choice of prior is unimportant. (If anyone tells you the prior is unimportant in any situation, they are wrong.) With a suitable estimate of the prior likelihood of Doom Soon, the posterior likelihood of Doom Soon is still low enough.
Is there a strong, formal version of the Doomsday argument not based on cubicles and such? The obvious flaw in that version is that it is based on finite possibilities: that is, finding oneself in this or that kind of universe out of so many possible ones. For starters, we have no idea of how likely our universe is; we know what numerator is 1, but what goes on the denominator? Is there even such a number? If so it i…
As far as I know, that's a requirement for any thought experiment involving SSA vs. SAA.
>Now we modify the thought experiment a bit. We still have the hundred cubicles but this time they are not painted blue or red. Instead they are numbered from 1 to 100. The numbers are painted on the outside. Then a fair coin is tossed (by God perhaps). If the coin falls heads, one person is created in each cubicle. If the coin falls tails, then persons are only created in cubicles 1 through 10. >You find yourself in…