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Topic: Doomsday argument

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	I.Danka.Doomsday
		An answer to the question whether or not doomsday comes on is quite different from an answer to how probable it is. Therefore if someone is not a verificationist or an antirealist, she doesn’t need to argue against the probability of the Doomsday Soon scenario, for arguing that it is unreasonable to believe.
		Doomsday Suggestion: The fact that there is at least one observer makes it reasonable to believe that Doomsday is coming (either soon or late).
		Doomsday Claim: The fact that there is at least one observer involves that Doomsday is coming (either soon or late).
	www.personal.ceu.hu /students/03/Istvan_Aranyosi/I_Danka_Doomsday.html (3875 words)

	Doomsday argument - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		The Doomsday argument (DA) is a probabilistic argument that claims to predict the future lifetime of the human race given only an estimate of the total number of humans born so far.
		The probabilistic argument used in the Doomsday Argument can easily be applied to anything else; therefore, with 95% certainty, ANY event that has occured a certain number of times has used up at least 5% of it's existance, which is one twentieth.
		The Doomsday Argument says that all they have to ask is how long we've been on the road (at least 40,000 years without an accident), they should calculate our insurance based on us having a 50% chance of having a fatal accident inside another 40,000 years.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Doomsday_argument (5882 words)

	Self-referencing doomsday argument rebuttal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Self-referencing doomsday argument rebuttals attempt to refute the Doomsday argument (that there is a credible link between the brevity of the human race's existence and its expected extinction) by applying the same reasoning to the life time of the Doomsday argument (DA) itself.
		The "quick extinction" in possibility 1 is considered fairly likely in those Doomsday arguments using the number of births as a reference class, but comparing like-for-like we should compare the length of time the DA survives before refutation with the length of time the human race survives before extinction.
		Monton and Roush's Summary of Doomsday argument and objections Objection 4: Self-Reference Leads to Refutation argues that a deterministic interpretation of Gott's DA is sufficient to refute it when considering how its truth or falsity applies to its own expected period of (pre-refutation) survival.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Self-referencing_doomsday_argument_rebuttal (865 words)

	Doomsday argument: Facts and details from Encyclopedia Topic (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-26)
		The doomsday clock is a symbolic clockface maintained since 1947 by the board of directors of the bulletin of the atomic scientists....
		The self-indication assumption doomsday argument rebuttal is an objection to the doomsday argument (that there is only a 5% chance of more than twenty times the...
		John Eastmond's "Many-Worlds Resolution of the Doomsday Argument" claims that extension of the DA from a single historic timeline into a form dealing with many simultaneous 'quasi-histories' is impossible.
	www.absoluteastronomy.com /encyclopedia/d/do/doomsday_argument.htm (9644 words)

	Leslie End of the World
		I believe the structure of the Doomsday Argument can best be analyzed if we consider h to be the hypothesis that the human species will become extinct soon, and e the evidence of various risks, such as evidence for extinction through disease, asteroid impacts or nuclear war.
		The Doomsday argument and responses to it show that our fundamental concepts of probability are unclear or at least that there is little consensus among experts in probability theory about the meaning of the main ideas ("randomness", etc.) or the truth of certain theses.
		Since this assumption is false, the real criticism of the Doomsday argument is the "external criticism", namely, the criticism that statistical unusualness or usualness in a merely conceived, randomized reference class cannot affect the probabilities of possible causes becoming actual.
	www.qsmithwmu.com /leslie_end_of_time.htm (12418 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-26)
		So let's apply the Doomsday argument to Figure 1 If I've parachuted randomly into the world in time as well as in space, and IF this parachuting is considered to be randomly targeted but weighted according to population density by some hypothetical experimenter, then the Doomsday Solution is right.
		The familiar argument says I should say I'm probably near the right wall, wherever that is. In this case, the argument is sound, although again it is not the temporal or spatial character of the scenario that matters but just its epistemological form.
		Standard arguments against agnoscicism (e.g., the possibility of being forced to bet on an answer, on pain of death or some huge reward) may come into play here: personally, we are agnostic about whether agnosticism is a stable stance.
	www.usyd.edu.au /su/hps/preprints/preprint2/Doomsday.doc (4402 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-26)
		So let's apply the Doomsday argument to Figure 1 If I've parachuted randomly into the world in time as well as in space, and IF this parachuting is considered to be randomly targeted but weighted according to population density by some hypothetical experi menter, then the Doomsday Solution is right.
		The familiar argument says I should say I'm probably near the right wall, wherever that is. In this case, the argument is sound, although again it is not the temporal or spatial character of the scenario that matters but just its episte mological form.
		The difference that this extraneous information makes is that once we've decided that the Doomsday problem, treated as a logical problem, is underdetermined, an appropriate response is to drop the argument but to continue to pursue the sub stantive issue (the human race dying out) by invoking all that extra-logical knowledge.
	www.usyd.edu.au /hps/preprints/preprint2/Doomsday.txt (4287 words)

	LRB \| Mark Greenberg : Apocalypse Not Just Now (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-26)
		As I will show, the Doomsday Argument's fundamental mistake is to rely on the intuitive but misguided notion that we can in general take ourselves to be typical humans, and thus, in effect, random samples of the species.
		The Doomsday Argument tells us to adjust the probability of imminent Doom in the light of the observation that we are alive at this point in human history.
		The Argument uses all the information about the species that is available at the time, including how long it has so far survived and how many humans have so far lived, to reformulate the hypotheses and recalculate their prior probabilities.
	www.lrb.co.uk /v21/n13/gree04_.html (4180 words)

	Doomsday argument: Encyclopedia topic (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-26)
		The Doomsday argument is a probabilistic argument (probabilistic argument: the word probability derives from the latin probare (to prove, or to test)....
		If doomsday (doomsday: An unpleasant or disastrous destiny) requires nuclear weaponry then the DA 'reference class' is: people contemporaneous with nuclear weapons.
		The Doomsday argument (DA) is that even if we were completely ignorant of the game we could make the same prediction, or profit by offering a bet paying odds (odds: The ratio by which one better's wager is greater than that of another) of 2-to-3 on the batsmen doubling his current score.
	www.absoluteastronomy.com /reference/doomsday_argument (6478 words)

	The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction
		In any case, the version of the Doomsday Argument at issue here was derived from a suggestion by Brandon Carter, but it is in large measure Leslie's.
		In the same way, the probabilities of specific risks to the survival of the human race, which we might be inclined to dismiss at 1% or 2%, would undergo inflation comparable to that of the probability of the lottery urn having had just 10 tickets in it.
		The argument for risk inflation stands even though the risks from the perils in question are not quantifiable.
	pages.prodigy.net /aesir/teotw.htm (2251 words)

	Doomsday - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Doomsday (2006 film), a low-budget zombie film currently in production to be completed in late 2006
		Doomsday argument, a statistical speculation on human extinction
		Doomsday device, a technical design for producing a doomsday event
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Doomsday (207 words)

	Critiquing the Doomsday Argument
		In the end, however, the argument is unpersuasive.
		But but I find it hard to make sense of many of their qualitative arguments, and I find it frustrating that these arguments have rarely been fully formalized using our standard formal approach to modeling inference (at least when everything is finite).
		But I do not think the doomsday argument is one of them.
	hanson.gmu.edu /nodoom.html (2695 words)

	Comments on 18981 \| MetaFilter
		The Doomsday argument is an important exception." On the contrary, however, the argument is not empirical in the least.
		Now, one might argue that the Doomsday Argument is still useful, because it may show us that Doomsday is more likely than not, but in actuality it tells us nothing, because it's based on the assumption that we know nothing about the conditions which will produce the result.
		In the case of the doomsday argument we are asked to believe that number seven is special simply because it is the seventh in the sequence of balls pulled from the urn.
	www.metafilter.com /mefi/18981 (7245 words)

	Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?
		Arguments for this thesis have been given in the literature, and although it is not entirely uncontroversial, we shall here take it as a given.
		The simulation argument works equally well for those who think that it will take hundreds of thousands of years to reach a “posthuman” stage of civilization, where humankind has acquired most of the technological capabilities that one can currently show to be consistent with physical laws and with material and energy constraints.
		The second alternative in the simulation argument’s conclusion is that the fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulation is negligibly small.
	www.simulation-argument.com /simulation.html (4855 words)

	sciforums.com - The Doomsday Argument
		Actually, the argument in question might be something more serious than just idle pastime; you'll be able to decide on that for yourself soon enough.
		The Doomsday Argument is something that was first proposed by the Cambridge astrophysicist Brandon Carter in a lecture to the Royal Society in the early 1980's.
		In fact, I could further decrease the chances of doomsday by leaving no one alive but myself, since the odds of being exactly last out of billions is even more unlikely than being among the last ten out of billions.
	www.sciforums.com /showthread.php?t=3196 (3413 words)

	Mind: A refutation of the Doomsday Argument (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-26)
		Carter and Leslie's Doomsday Argument maintains that reflection upon the number of humans born thus far, when that number is viewed as having been uniformly randomly selected from amongst all humans, past, present and future, leads to a dramatic rise in the probability of an early end to the human experiment.
		The argument was invented by Brandon Carter as an extension of his "anthropic principle".
		The Doomsday Argument was conceived by the astrophysicist
	www.findarticles.com /p/articles/mi_m2346/is_n426_v107/ai_20550244 (346 words)

	The Doomsday Argument is Alive and Kicking
		Assuming that the Argument supports the conclusion that the total population is bounded by two times the sample value … then 499 inferences using the Doomsday Argument form are wrong and 501 inferences are right, which we submit is a lousy track record for an inductive inference schema.
		The Doomsday argument (in step 3) only served to cancel the effect which we took into account in step 2, namely that you were more likely to turn out to be in the human species given that the human species is one of the large rather than one of the small civilizations.
		Returning to the case where you are supposed to apply the Doomsday argument to your own life span, it appears that the no-outsider requirement is not satisfied.
	www.anthropic-principle.com /preprints/ali/alive.html (3900 words)

	The Doomsday argument FAQ
		Note that the Doomsday argument doesn't say you should expect to be one of the very last humans, just that you shouldn't expect to be one of the very first.
		In Richard Gott's version of the Doomsday argument (who independently discovered it) [1], the probability that you are in the first 10% of the human species is simply 10%, the probability that you are in the first 1% is 1%, and so on.
		In the technical sense, "doomsday" means the point in time where no more beings exist that belong to the same reference class as you and me. Exactly how widely or how narrowly the reference class should be defined for the purposes of the DA is an unsolved problem.
	www.anthropic-principle.com /faq.html (2385 words)

	A Third Route to the Doomsday Argument
		ABSTRACT In this paper, I present a solution to the Doomsday argument based on a third type of solution, by contrast to on the one hand, the Carter-Leslie view and on the other hand, the Eckhardt et al.
		Now the argument can be described as a reasoning leading to a Bayesian shift, from an analogy between what has been termed the two-urn case[2] and the corresponding human situation.
		44): 'The doomsday argument has been shown to be fallacious due to the incorrect assumption that you are a random sample from the set of all humans ever to have existed.’.
	www.univ-corse.fr /~franceschi/doomsday-en.htm (9326 words)

	c o m p l e x . c i t y » doomsday.argument
		doomsday.argument is an online countdown based on a probabilistic argument that claims to predict the future lifetime of the human race given only an estimate of the total number of humans born so far.
		The current doomsday argument’s conclusion is a 95% chance of extinction within 9120 years.
		A complete definition of doomsday argument can be found here.
	complex.city.online.fr /?cat=2 (85 words)

	Doomsday Argument for Idiots \| Ask MetaFilter
		The Doomsday argument assumes that over the entire history of the human species, there will be a finite number of humans.
		But this argument lies on an unstated assumption: that, without knowing anything about what number human I am, it would be 50% likely that the final number of humans would be 60 billion, and 50% likely that the final number would be 6 trillion.
		Thus 'N' in the doomsday argument is massive and meaningless.
	ask.metafilter.com /mefi/19217 (4653 words)

	The Doomsday Argument and Hempel's Problem
		Thus, it appears that the argument based on the reference class and its arbitrary choice by restriction or extension constitutes a common solution to HP and DA.
		The inherent argument in DA is indeed based on the use of the anthropic principle and requires obviously a reference class made up of intelligent beings.
		Thus, it proves that the arguments advanced in support of the reference class of DA can be transposed in defence of HP.
	www.univ-corse.fr /~franceschi/HP(GB).html (5599 words)

	Doomsday and Bayes
		The "doomsday argument" is actually a classical frequentist confidence interval.
		The doomsday argument is pretty silly (and also, it's not Bayesian).
		One problem with the Doomsday Argument is that there isn't just one of them - there are several, some Bayesian, some not, propounded with varying degrees of statistical literacy.
	www.stat.columbia.edu /~cook/movabletype/archives/2005/11/doomsday_and_ba.html (456 words)

	Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?
		The Simulation Argument is perhaps the first interesting argument for the existence of a Creator in 2000 years.
		The first part of this paper is devoted to broadening the scope of the argument: even if computers cannot sustain consciousness (as many dualists and materialists believe), there may still be a strong likelihood that we are living simulated lives.
		The topics discussed include: the Doomsday argument, scepticism, the different modes of virtual life, transcendental idealism, the Problem of Evil, and simulation ethics.
	www.simulation-argument.com (954 words)

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