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turchin comments on Open Thread, Aug. 1 - Aug 7. 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Maybe someone better at statistics than me (I'll withhold my own suspicions of the answer) can answer a question:
Given that life has been around for billions of years without very many huge extinction events, it seems likely that the environment is a very stable system and runaway global warming is false.
However, if the environment is an extremely unstable system, such that runaway global warming always results in total extinction of all life, then the anthropic principle comes info effect.
So my question is: Can we actually then say that runaway global warming is a small probability event?
I think that we strongly underestimate not only probability of runaway global warming but also fragility of our environment because of anthropic bias.
May be runaway global warming is long overdue in our planet and small human actions could trigger it.
I wrote an article about it several years ago, but I want to rewrite it completely. The current version is here: "Why anthropic principle stops to defend us: observation selection, future rate of natural disasters and fragility of our environment" http://www.slideshare.net/avturchin/why-anthropic-principle-stopped-to-defend-us-observation-selection-and-fragility-of-our-environment