A point I haven’t seen made about the Doomsday Argument is that as time goes by, the predicted doom recedes into the future. It isn’t like we just discovered that a specific catastrophe is awaiting us at a specific time, like the sun going nova, or even a constant probability per unit time of something, like an asteroid strike. Every year that goes by without doom makes the DA-predicted time until doom a year longer. And since DA also predicts that doom isn’t going to happen immediately, one could conclude that there’s nothing to worry about.
Touche - doom keeps receding, until suddenly it doesn’t (because it just happened).
However, I think that one practical reason for “worrying about it” is the implied increase of our epistemic probability that Doom is going to happen. That could suggest all sorts of actions, such as: let’s take particular Doom scenarios seriously, and try to mitigate them. Certainly, let’s not scoff at doomsayers as “alarmist”(the traditional reaction), but think of why they might be right.
A point I haven’t seen made about the Doomsday Argument is that as time goes by, the predicted doom recedes into the future. It isn’t like we just discovered that a specific catastrophe is awaiting us at a specific time, like the sun going nova, or even a constant probability per unit time of something, like an asteroid strike. Every year that goes by without doom makes the DA-predicted time until doom a year longer. And since DA also predicts that doom isn’t going to happen immediately, one could conclude that there’s nothing to worry about.
Touche - doom keeps receding, until suddenly it doesn’t (because it just happened).
However, I think that one practical reason for “worrying about it” is the implied increase of our epistemic probability that Doom is going to happen. That could suggest all sorts of actions, such as: let’s take particular Doom scenarios seriously, and try to mitigate them. Certainly, let’s not scoff at doomsayers as “alarmist”(the traditional reaction), but think of why they might be right.