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timtyler comments on Contrarianism and reference class forecasting - Less Wrong
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A relative absence of smaller disasters must count as evidence against the views of those predicting large disasters. There are some disasters which are all-or-nothing - but most disasters are variable in scale. We have had some wars and pandemics - but civilization has mostly brushed them off so far.
What absence of smaller disasters? Why don't the brushes with nuclear war and other things you mention count?
Also, civilizations have fallen. Not in the sense of their genes dying out [1] but in the sense of losing the technological level they previously had. The end of the Islamic Golden Age, China after the 15th century, the fall of Rome (I remember reading one statistic that said that the glass production peak during the Roman empire wasn't surpassed until the 19th century, and it wasn't from lack of demand.)
[1] unless you count the Neanderthals, which were probably more intelligent than h. sapiens. And all the other species in genus homo.
Really? Can you give more detail (or a link) please?
Here's a summary of the different species in homo -- note the brain volumes. (I didn't mean to say all were intelligent, just that they were all near-human and went extinct, but the Neanderthals were likely more intelligent.)
And here:
The WP table you link to gives these cranial volume ranges: H. sapiens, 1000-1850. H. neanderthalensis, 1200-1900.
Given the size of the ranges and > 70% overlap, the difference between 1850 and 1900 at the upper end doesn't seem necessarily significant. Besides, brain size correlates strongly with body size, and Neanderthals were more massive, weren't they?
More importantly, if the contemporary variation for H. sapiens (i.e. us) is all or most of that huge range (1000-1850 cc), do we know how it correlates with various measures of intellectual and other capabilities? Especially if you throw away the upper and lower 10% of variation.
It wasn't just the brain size, but the greater technological and cultural achievements that are evidenced in their remains, which are listed and cited in the articles.
By greater do you mean greater than those of H. sapiens who lived at the same time? AFAICS, the Wikipedia articles seem to state the opposite: that Neanderthals, late ones at least, were technologically and culturally inferior to H. sapiens of the same time.
The paragraph right after the one you quoted from your second link states:
The following paragraphs (through to the end of that section of the article) detail tools and cultural or social innovations that were (by conjecture) exclusive to H. sapiens. There are no specific things listed that were exclusive to Neanderthals. What "greater achievements" do you refer to?
Also, I see no basis (at least in the WP article) for "the obvious fact that Neanderthals were highly intelligent", except for brain size which is hardly conclusive. Why can't we conclude that they were considerably less intelligent than their contemporary H. sapiens?
Okay, I confess, it's above my pay grade at this point: all I can do is defer to predominant theory in the field that Neanderthals were more intelligent at the level of the individual.
Note that this doesn't mean they were more "collectively intelligent". If they were better at problem solving on their own, but weren't as social as humans, they may have failed to pass knowledge between people and ended up re-inventing the wheel too much.
But that's just what I'm asking about! Can you please give me some references that present or at least mention this theory? Because the WP articles don't even seem to mention it, and I can't find anything like it on Google.
The theory is that they had bigger brains - e.g. see the reference at:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/165/how_inevitable_was_modern_human_civilization_data/124q
Given the circumstances that would have been quite some achievement!
.2
Can you expand please? Exactly what measurement is correlated with cranial capacity at .2?
This is still civilisation's very first attempt, really. I did acknowledge the existence of wars and pandemics. However, disasters that never happened (such as nuclear war) are challenging to accurately assess the probability of.