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timtyler comments on This Failing Earth - Less Wrong
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It seems like a bit of a down post. My impression is that our position is pretty sweet. We face an almost-amazingly benign environment. Indeed, the environment seems better than we have reason to expect on anthropic grounds - curiously so, perhaps.
How do I reconcile this view with all the doom-sayers? I have a hypothesis about many of them. It seems to me that the same people who claim that there are great risks ahead are often the same people who have plans to RAISE THE ALARM and/or SAVE THE WORLD.
I can understand why people would want to play heroic roles, or be seen to be alerting others to danger. However, doom seems to be an event with extremely poor historical foundations. Based on these observations, my hypothesis is that the heroic effort to SAVE THE WORLD is the cause - and that proclaiming that the end is nigh is one of its effects.
Well, that went down well.
This is not a new phenomenon:
http://bringontheendtimes.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/end-nigh.jpg
Are there any other plausible explanations for the cult of the apocalypse?
The end of the world is, after all, probably the single most repeated incorrect prediction of all time. The world has repeatedly stubbornly refused to end for thousands of years now - and yet for many the clock always seems to stand at five-minutes-to-midnight.
The fact that we find ourselves in a world which has not ended is not evidence.
Er, I wasn't citing the existence of the world as evidence, rather pointing to the extended period of time which it has persisted for - which is relevant evidence.
Or thereabouts anyway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock
Since these are scientists you might think that they would realise someday that the clock is wrong - but no - it's been about five minutes to midnight for over 50 years! Amazing! Just think how lucky that makes us! Or maybe not - maybe this has something to do with marketing their bulletin.
The difference between then and now is that today, there are actually plausible ways it could happen.
I was wondering why p(doom) has apparently been so consistently overestimated. Perhaps another possible reason is attention-seeking. When Martin Rees mentioned a probability of 0.5 on p.8 of "Our Final Century", people paid attention. Politicians are in on the act as well - check out Al Gore. Doom sells. Perhaps scaring people shitless is simply good marketing.
Could you expand on this? What quality of environment should we expect on anthropic grounds?
One that permits the evolution of intelligent agents - not necessarily one that permits them to easily spread throughout the universe.
Maybe, but I'm not really convinced. If there's a technological pathway between prehistory and space colonization, it's not a miracle for intelligence to find it; and while the complete nonexistence of such pathways might be a generic feature of planets and biospheres containing intelligence, I don't see why it necessarily would be.
It clearly isn't necessarily so, if we are a counter-example, as I am assuming.
I don't claim to have a hard scientific case for my statement. I'm just stating my impression - that we seem to have it pretty sweet, perhaps sweeter than we should reasonably expect.