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orthonormal comments on The Importance of Self-Doubt - Less Wrong
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Just for a starter:
And for every notable prophet or peace activist or whatever there are thousands forgotten by history.
And if you count Petrov - it's not obvious why as he didn't save the world - in any case he wasn't claiming that he's going to save the world earlier, so P(saved the world|claimed to be world-savior) is less than P(saved the world|didn't claim to be world-savior).
You seem to be horribly confused here. I'm not arguing that nobody will ever save the world, just that a particular person claiming to is extremely unlikely.
Given how low the chance is, I'll pass.
You should count Bacon, who believed himself– accurately– to be taking the first essential steps toward understanding and mastery of nature for the good of mankind. If you don't count him on the grounds that he wasn't concerned with existential risk, then you'd have to throw out all prophets who didn't claim that their failure would increase existential risk.
Accurately? Bacon doesn't seem to have any special impact on anything, or on existential risks in particular.
Man, I hope you don't mean that.
He believed that the scientific method he developed and popularized would improve the world in ways that were previously unimaginable. He was correct, and his life accelerated the progress of the scientific revolution.
The claim may be weaker than a claim to help with existential risk, but it still falls into your reference class more easily than a lot of messiahs do.
This looks like a drastic overinterpretation. He seems like just another random philosopher, he didn't "develop scientific method", empiricism was far older and modern science far more recent than Bacon, and there's little basis for even claiming radically discontinuous "scientific revolution" around Bacon's times.