I’d say that this is clashing with the sense that more should be possible in the world, and it has the problem that the reference classes are based on specific results. You almost sound like Lord Kelvin.
The reference class of things promising eternal life is huge, but it’s also made of stuff that is amazingly irrational, entirely based on narrative, and propped up with the greatest anti-epistemology the world has ever known. Typically there were no moving parts.
The reference class for coming of a new world, to me, includes predictions like talk about the Enlightenment (I seem to remember very rosy predictions existing early on, but this is not my area of expertise) and other cases where people decided to work in a coordinated way to create a new world or people who had a somewhat coherent theory of society predicted a new world (the best-known example for this is of course Communism which was a flop, but it is not the only one.)
Almost omnipotent beings: The gods of most religions are clearly not omnipotent: they act according to the rules of drama.
Eternal life: If you remove the completely religious spam, you get stuff like the Fountain of Youth and the Philosopher’s Stone, which still were things that people thought had to exist, not things that people realized should be possible to make.
Analyses of working systems trump comparisons to past nonoccurrence that seem similar to humans but were predicted for completely different reasons.
I’d say that this is clashing with the sense that more should be possible in the world, and it has the problem that the reference classes are based on specific results. You almost sound like Lord Kelvin.
The reference class of things promising eternal life is huge, but it’s also made of stuff that is amazingly irrational, entirely based on narrative, and propped up with the greatest anti-epistemology the world has ever known. Typically there were no moving parts.
The reference class for coming of a new world, to me, includes predictions like talk about the Enlightenment (I seem to remember very rosy predictions existing early on, but this is not my area of expertise) and other cases where people decided to work in a coordinated way to create a new world or people who had a somewhat coherent theory of society predicted a new world (the best-known example for this is of course Communism which was a flop, but it is not the only one.)
Almost omnipotent beings: The gods of most religions are clearly not omnipotent: they act according to the rules of drama.
Eternal life: If you remove the completely religious spam, you get stuff like the Fountain of Youth and the Philosopher’s Stone, which still were things that people thought had to exist, not things that people realized should be possible to make.
Analyses of working systems trump comparisons to past nonoccurrence that seem similar to humans but were predicted for completely different reasons.