For most of human history, the future pretty much was like the past. It’s not hard to argue that, between the Neolithic Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, not all that much really changed for the average person.
Things that still haven’t changed:
People still grow and eat wheat, rice, corn, and other staple grains. People still communicate by flapping their lips. People still react to almost any infant communications or artistic medium in the same way: by trying to use it for pornography and radical politics, usually in that order. People still fight each other. People still live under governments. People still get married and live in families. People still get together in large groups to build impressive things. People still get sick and die of infectious disease—and doctors are still of questionable value in many cases.
You’re only talking about human history. The history of the world is much longer. You’re also ignoring the different rates of change between genes, brains, agriculture, industry, and computation.
ETA: You edited your comment while I was typing mine.
Isn’t that an excellent example of how a reference class forecast can fail miserably?
“Not much changed between 65,000,000 years ago and 50,000 years ago, therefore not much will change between 50,000 years ago and now.” is basically the argument, but notice that we’ve had lots of changes within the past few hundred years, let alone the last 50,000.
The said argument doesn’t give certainties, it only gives you chances of something happening in the next 50,000 years based on what happened in the past—the chance correctly being extremely low.
Chance of event more extreme than anything ever happened before depends on your sample size. If your reference class is tiny, you need to assign high probability to extreme events; if your class is huge, probability of an extreme event is low. (The main complication is that samples are almost never close to being independent, and figuring out exact numbers is really difficult in practice. I’m not going to get into this, there might be some estimation method for that based on meta-reference-classes.)
For most of human history, the future pretty much was like the past. It’s not hard to argue that, between the Neolithic Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, not all that much really changed for the average person.
Things that still haven’t changed:
People still grow and eat wheat, rice, corn, and other staple grains.
People still communicate by flapping their lips.
People still react to almost any infant communications or artistic medium in the same way: by trying to use it for pornography and radical politics, usually in that order.
People still fight each other.
People still live under governments.
People still get married and live in families.
People still get together in large groups to build impressive things.
People still get sick and die of infectious disease—and doctors are still of questionable value in many cases.
You’re only talking about human history. The history of the world is much longer. You’re also ignoring the different rates of change between genes, brains, agriculture, industry, and computation.
ETA: You edited your comment while I was typing mine.
You typed that. Is this a joke?
And not much changed between the extinction of the dinosaurs and the beginnings of human culture, either.
returns ball
Isn’t that an excellent example of how a reference class forecast can fail miserably?
“Not much changed between 65,000,000 years ago and 50,000 years ago, therefore not much will change between 50,000 years ago and now.” is basically the argument, but notice that we’ve had lots of changes within the past few hundred years, let alone the last 50,000.
The said argument doesn’t give certainties, it only gives you chances of something happening in the next 50,000 years based on what happened in the past—the chance correctly being extremely low.
Chance of event more extreme than anything ever happened before depends on your sample size. If your reference class is tiny, you need to assign high probability to extreme events; if your class is huge, probability of an extreme event is low. (The main complication is that samples are almost never close to being independent, and figuring out exact numbers is really difficult in practice. I’m not going to get into this, there might be some estimation method for that based on meta-reference-classes.)