I don’t understand why Doomsday-ish arguments aren’t front and centre when talking about existential risks. Obviously the DA is talked about, but it seems to be talked about way less than makes sense to me.
I see lots of very smart people estimating <10% probability of x-risk. Is there some obvious reason why these people don’t find the DA persuasive? If you don’t find it persuasive yourself, why is that?
My intuition says that if we’re looking at a flourishing future of trillions of humans, it seems incredibly unlikely that we’d find ourselves at the start of that timeline. Particularly when a number of ways we could kill ourselves seem to be pretty much on the horizon. When I think about it that way, I feel a visceral hopelessness.
Most of what I have been able to find has to do with arguing over the use of various sampling assumptions—is there any other more intuitive reason why people don’t talk about the DA very often? (maybe this is asking too much and I should just knuckle down and try to properly understand anthropic reasoning lol)
[Question] Why don’t people talk about the Doomsday Argument more often?
Epistemic status: confused, probably missing something obvious
An explanation of the Doomsday Argument
I don’t understand why Doomsday-ish arguments aren’t front and centre when talking about existential risks. Obviously the DA is talked about, but it seems to be talked about way less than makes sense to me.
I see lots of very smart people estimating <10% probability of x-risk. Is there some obvious reason why these people don’t find the DA persuasive? If you don’t find it persuasive yourself, why is that?
My intuition says that if we’re looking at a flourishing future of trillions of humans, it seems incredibly unlikely that we’d find ourselves at the start of that timeline. Particularly when a number of ways we could kill ourselves seem to be pretty much on the horizon. When I think about it that way, I feel a visceral hopelessness.
Most of what I have been able to find has to do with arguing over the use of various sampling assumptions—is there any other more intuitive reason why people don’t talk about the DA very often? (maybe this is asking too much and I should just knuckle down and try to properly understand anthropic reasoning lol)