Doomsday Thereom

[tek]

What if people like Edison sat around musing about the same crap you do?

Perfecting the lightbulb was beneficial. Your topic is not. Edison was able to work on inventions as an excersise (as in learning to think logically).

You say "We are all going to die. The entire human race will become extinct eventually." I agree, but does that mean we should waste our abilities in the meantime? If you answer yes, then you have proven yourself to be a fool not worthy of further consideration.

[jimdmcevoy]

You still have not fully defined what you mean by beneficial, and why my example is not.

And I don't disagree with you about how we shouldn't waste our time in the meantime. I mentioned human extinction because I had a feeling that your definition of beneficial would not make sense in light of this, so I went ahead and said it just in case my feeling was right.

[Sephus]

this post is just terrible. there are so many things wrong with it. when i read it i was hoping it was a joke.

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When you think about it, if we were just as likely to be an ant as a human,

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what the hell? you think there's a chance that there are quintillions of souls floating around in the ether and then "zap," they become ants, aardvarks, arthropods, by random assignment? like god is picking souls "ok you trillion get to be plankton, and you over there get to be floyd johnson of plano, texas."

you don't seem to believe in god/the supernatural, yet you believe that "you" have an existence apart from your body. you couldnt have been an ant because you are YOU, and the reason you're YOU is that you were born a fricking human being! if you're not born a human, there IS no "you."

that's so [censored] stupid, it sounds like something a five-year old would wonder about, not a college student. "i wish i were born a bird."

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don't you think it's highly unlikely that we are the species who is the most intelligent on Earth? If you just compare the weight of all insects to the weight of all humans, I think the insects would weigh about million times more.

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so you're saying intelligence is proportional to combined weight of an ESSENTAILLY ARBITRARY GROUPING (the reason the concept of "insects" exists is because biologists find such a grouping useful)! dude, you know what, those insects have a ton of combined weight, but bacteria have a combined weight that is SO much greater! bacteria must be SMART. but you know who's even smarter than bacteria? plants, humans, and spotted eels! when you combine the weights of plants, humans, and spotted eels, its MUCH greater than the combined weight of either insects or bacteria, therefore THAT group has more intelligence than the others.

i'd go on, but i've wasted enough time. get a clue.

[jimdmcevoy]

"this post is just terrible. there are so many things wrong with it. when i read it i was hoping it was a joke."

I am facinated by the way some people like to tell other people they are stupid one way or another (very common among americans). I would really like to know, what are you trying to acomplish from this? Do you really think that I'll think "Well, he called me stupid, therefore I must be." I'm sure you're aware that for most people if you call them stupid and then argue with them they are much much less likely to agree with you, and even if they do agree with you they will still argue against you out of spite. So the question remains, what's the purpose?

It reminds me of say someone going all in with pocket kings in NL holdem preflop, they get called by J9 and the J9 makes two pair and wins, the guy with pocket kings goes nuts and then berates the other guy for bad play. I just don't see the point, I for one would like those calls against me.

Anyway it is my opinion that you don't understand what I am saying, and given the tone in your post, there is zero chance that you will change your mind, so I won't even bother explaining your misunderstandings.

But I am curious as to why you posted what you did, I can see no logical reason for it(actually I can take a guess, but I want to hear what you have to say)

[rdu $teve]

Interesting post, interesting logic. When I say interesting, I mean that you need to get some serious help, and you have far to much time on your hands, that could be used more efficiently playing poker. Im no math wiz, or anything like that, so I'll stay out of that part of it.

However, aside from religious beliefs, who is to say what will cause the end of the world. I really dont see how this can be figured mathmatically based on the number of humans, or other life forms, that have lived throughout history.

just my 2¢


PS you forgot to include all the aliens living on other planets! What were you thinking? [/sarcasm]

[Grisgra]

Probably someone already posted this, but just in case they haven't:

http://www.anthropic-principle.com/preprints/lit/

[eldynamite]

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This will give each person a random number between 1 and N, and it will be ordered as you put it.

Suppose I chose N randomly to begin with.


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In my opinion, this is where the fallacy lies. It simply isn't possible to choose a positive integer 'randomly'. You must specify a range. If the range is infinite, as is the case with positive integers, then any integer that purports to be random will be larger than a finite number of integers, and smaller than an infinite number of integers. So, the candidate 'random' integer is guaranteed to have a magnitude that is infinitesimal compared to range from which it was chosen -- an obvious contradiction.

In the Doomsday argument, it is assumed that a particular human has been chosen at random, but this is patent nonsense because we have no idea what the range is. It is even possible in principle that there will be an infinite number of human beings. (We might need to revise Big Bang theory to accommodate this, however.)

Mike Caro, the "Mad Genius of Poker", describes a paradox related to this one. See:


Mike Caro Article


Tim

[irchans]

I notice that many very smart people call each other stupid during political campaigns.

[Piers]

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This will give each person a random number between 1 and N, and it will be ordered as you put it.

Suppose I chose N randomly to begin with.


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In my opinion, this is where the fallacy lies. It simply isn't possible to choose a positive integer 'randomly'. You must specify a range.


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You are right about not it making much sense to choose an integer randomly without specifying a particular probability distribution.

However you are wrong about that being the fallacy in his doomsday argument.

N is the total number of humans to ever exist, which is assumed by one of the axioms to be finite. So there is no problem in choosing a random number between 1 and N.

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It is even possible in principle that there will be an infinite number of human beings.


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Well of course, however we will never know. So it is OK to make ether assumption.

Apart from being presented badly there is no particular fallacy in his argument. To get his absurd conclusion he had to claim that the random number assigned to him was a specific value, 50 billion in fact. That is the problem he had no right to do this.

If N is the total number of Humans to ever exist. Choose a number between 1 and N. 90% of the time it will be between 0.1*N and N. Or to turn this on its head, if you know that a random number between 1 and N is say 72. This makes it very likely that N is less than 200 say. Certainly it would be very very unlikely to large say 2000000 billion.

In effect he said lets consider a random number between 1 and another number that I don’t know but is quite big. Then he magics up the statement that this number has to be around 50 million with no further assumptions, then goes on to show that this leads to an absurd conclusion.

[jimdmcevoy]

I actually only used 50 billion for an example, but wouldn't you say it's within an order of magnitude anyway?

I didn't discuss my "magics up" because I thought it would make my argument even more boring. If you really really want I will discuss my magics up-ing.