Let me make the case why filter-ology isn’t so exciting by extending part of your own model: the fact that you take evidence into account.
The basic doomsday argument model asks us to pretend that we are amnesiacs—that we don’t know any astronomy or history or engineering, all we know is that we’ve drawn some random number in a list of indeterminate length. If that numbered list is the ordering of human births, we’re halfway through. If we consign the number of humans to the memory hole and say that the list is years in the lifespan of our species, we’re halfway through that, too. Easy and simple.
Once you start talking about evidence, though—having observations of our universe, like the lack of aliens in the night sky, that we condition on when predicting the future—you’ve started down a slippery slope. Why not also condition on the fact that nuclear weapons have been invented, or condition on the UN being formed? Condition on life being carbon-based, or that octopuses are pretty smart, or the kinds of expolanets we’ve detected, or the inferred frequency of gramma-ray bursts in our local group? Some of these factors will change our expectations, just like how the negative evidence of aliens penalizes hypotheses where life is both likely to arise and to spread.
Some of this info is pretty important! If we’d had nuclear war in 1980 (or dealt with greenhouse gases better), I’d be more pessimistic (or optimistic) about humanity’s future.
At the bottom of this slippery slope, you’re dumped in the murky water of trying to predict the future based on lots of useful information, rather than a tractable but woefully incomplete model of the world.
I think supporters of the doomsday argument are saying you should consider all evidence, but the doomsday argument still stands. So we should use all the information available to make a prediction of the future and then, on top of all that, apply the doomsday argument so that the future looks bleaker. And that should be the case unless we find a logical error in the argument.
I think the error for the doomsday argument is to try and find an explanation for why I am this person, living in this time. It should be regarded as something primitively given, a reasoning starting point. Instead, it treated it as a sampling outcome. That is why I am against both SSA and SIA.
I’ll try not to be too grumpy, here.
Let me make the case why filter-ology isn’t so exciting by extending part of your own model: the fact that you take evidence into account.
The basic doomsday argument model asks us to pretend that we are amnesiacs—that we don’t know any astronomy or history or engineering, all we know is that we’ve drawn some random number in a list of indeterminate length. If that numbered list is the ordering of human births, we’re halfway through. If we consign the number of humans to the memory hole and say that the list is years in the lifespan of our species, we’re halfway through that, too. Easy and simple.
Once you start talking about evidence, though—having observations of our universe, like the lack of aliens in the night sky, that we condition on when predicting the future—you’ve started down a slippery slope. Why not also condition on the fact that nuclear weapons have been invented, or condition on the UN being formed? Condition on life being carbon-based, or that octopuses are pretty smart, or the kinds of expolanets we’ve detected, or the inferred frequency of gramma-ray bursts in our local group? Some of these factors will change our expectations, just like how the negative evidence of aliens penalizes hypotheses where life is both likely to arise and to spread.
Some of this info is pretty important! If we’d had nuclear war in 1980 (or dealt with greenhouse gases better), I’d be more pessimistic (or optimistic) about humanity’s future.
At the bottom of this slippery slope, you’re dumped in the murky water of trying to predict the future based on lots of useful information, rather than a tractable but woefully incomplete model of the world.
I see nothing grumpy here.
I think supporters of the doomsday argument are saying you should consider all evidence, but the doomsday argument still stands. So we should use all the information available to make a prediction of the future and then, on top of all that, apply the doomsday argument so that the future looks bleaker. And that should be the case unless we find a logical error in the argument.
I think the error for the doomsday argument is to try and find an explanation for why I am this person, living in this time. It should be regarded as something primitively given, a reasoning starting point. Instead, it treated it as a sampling outcome. That is why I am against both SSA and SIA.