Nornagest comments on Luminosity (Twilight fanfic) Part 2 Discussion Thread - Less Wrong

6 Post author: JenniferRM 25 October 2010 11:07PM

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Comment author: Nornagest 23 December 2010 01:14:07AM *  0 points [-]

A few months ago there was a poll in one of Sweden's biggest online newspapers that asked the readers if they believed the Earth would ever cease to exist or be destroyed, and an astounding majority believed that it wouldn't. A similar result is achieved if one asks: do you believe humanity will ever be extinct?

Beware of overgeneralizing from results like this one. I've seen a lot of similar surveys, and none of them have distinguished explicitly between "infinite" and "unbounded for practical purposes"; however, people outside of mathy fields tend to conflate the two. I'd read the Swedish result not as describing an actual infinity but as rejection of Singularitarianism and the more extreme Malthusian doomsday scenarios, which strikes me as a fairly reasonable standpoint.