@Romulas Ex Well, their plutocratic class but their uneducated elected a wannabe dictator who clearly doesnt care about the environment or the 7 billion people who live on the planet
think of the probem as -you live in a rental skyscaper -Everyone in that builning has a nuke and the norm is You or any disturbance of any kind is a reson let it get off -So the problem descibed is ..Why are you imagining or beliving in the future is now forverever and You wonder How long you the mankind in the house will live/survive .Every tenat ahs children and their children has the nuke -so with 1000 appartments and 1000 years -so how long would it take before one hits the trigger for no reason other than paranoia ..boredome or reson whatever .. not long .after 3 generation they are dead and we are now in the second
When I finished watching the video I realized that the very fact I've successfully finished watching the 18-min video has moved my median position 18 min forward and made our expected doomsday postponed by ~36 minutes. Keep making more videos, please! For our survival.
I'm a bit confused about something: Couldn't *any* human born at any point in history make the doomsday argument? A human born 2 million years ago would come to the conclusion that the end of the world is neigh, and so would a human born 2 million years from now. If we accept the reasoning of the doomsday argument, doesn't this just mean that everyone, for all of history, will come to the conclusion that we're all going to die sooner rather than later?
Yes, and every observer can only exist in a timeline in which all previous doomsday arguments were wrong. So don't worry about it and just keep trying our best regardless of what this fishy statistical hypothesis says, because even if the doomsday argument is right, we won't be there to observe it ;)
Pretty much. The difference in logic between the boxes & projecting the extent of human civilization reminds me of the Monty Hall problem*. For the boxes it's simple probability that we make 'safe' assumption of. I find in the 'probable doom' prediction that it's going from self-selection to self-fulfilling prophecy; kinda like how in stories they say that should one have the ability to foresee the future one should avoid reading TOO much into one's own future as projecting further out into the possibility space can be easily confounded by one's personal desires: you aren't predicting it you're making it happen.. I might not have conveyed all that well but I tried 😅 I mention Monty Hall because of how folks if they apply the wrong assumptions, will consistently get it wrong(double down) until you elucidate it via goat repeatedly. *On a game show you reach the end of the event: shown 3 doors, 1 has a car, 2 have goats, you pick a door, then the host to build suspense opens 1 of the 2 other doors to reveal a goat, then asks "Will you switch or will you stay your choice?": you are twice as likely to win the car if you switch to the 3rd other door: you flip from a 1/3 to 2/3 chance because you have new information, also the host has to know where the car is else he could reveal the car & you could just pick it already.. then again, if it's a really awesome goat...
And weren't they right? Feel free to ask them. I find it interesting that the doomsday argument predicts the end of the world in 50 years, which is also the time a human who would make such a prediction would still be expected to live. I wonder if there's a hidden link, or I am seeing stuff that just ain't there.
There are 7 billion people on earth alive today, there's also 10 000 000 000 000 000 ants. Since being born a human is so much rarer than being born an ant, we can conclude that we're probably ants hallucinating.
Ogg the Cro-Magnon: "Bad news, Thag, by statistical method, I calculate our race probably never going to exceed 500,000 total members. We got maybe 200 years left."
If you talk to a lottery winner they could use anthropic reasoning to assume winning the lottery is easy because it happened to them. Talk to the millions of losers and they would disagree. The existence of winners doesn't make the odds invalid tho just like the existence of the first .001% of humans doesn't mean that the anthropic argument is wrong. Just that it's most likely correct for the vast majority of humans that make it.
Step 1: Define reference class as "homo sapiens sapiens existing concurrently with the internet". Step 2: Observe that the internet has existed approximately 30 years. Step 3: Assume self-sampling principle makes sense and internet access is bell curved over the duration of its existence or skewed towards late-phase access... The internet's going to cease to exist some time in the next 30 years guys.
The difference between the numbered ball analogy and the universe is that both sets of balls exist, whereas there might not be another universe. You're not sampling your existence from both universes if there is only one, in which case your rank is equally likely to be in the middle, beginning or the very last one.
I accept these comments for certain videos on this channel, but if you actually whatch this one you'll notice that there is nothing hard here to understand.
@@randy2811 why is alien life always assumed ultra advanced?? And what us advanced and why would it 'help' us all dumb ideas, aliens most likely represent the most common forms of life on earth , blue green algae, bacteria, viri fungi etc. Except they wouldnt share any bio-dna link with you.... so no help
@@thethirdjegs get ready 2 be sad for ever, the only remote chance of finding something relatable are inter galaxy clusters..... but we wont get there .... maybe one other example in our current cluster but not likely close... good luck
Can't we use this argument in a slightly different way for the universe. Isn't it odd that we exist in a universe so young? The universe will according to our current understanding live on for thousands of billions of years, yet it's currently only 13.8 billion years old as we exist.
Yeah but if you think about it actually, we are pretty late to the whole life party considering that life was possible since the universe was about 1 billion or so years old, and in a few billion years the universe will die out due to the expansion of it so we dont have a lot of time to spend here
@@codrin8606 The fact we are so early to the whole party would mean there is a big chance that we are the only sufficiently advanced civilization. Imagine only 1 other civilization that beat us by 1 billion years in our own galaxy. Assuming our current rate of technological advancement in 1 billion years we should be an interstellar civilization maybe even an intergalactic one. If our assumptions about the earlier civilization are true, we should have seen signs or even communicated with them. But we haven't. PS: Just saw that you also used the word "party", I somehow didn't see it the first time I read your comment, but still used it myself :)
You can look at it two ways: The universe is very early in it's current state yet has produced intelligent life (presumably through some random natural process), hence intelligent life should be somewhat common in the universe throughout it's entire age. Furthermore, simple life appeared very quickly after appropriate conditions appeared on earth so it would appear that this process is somewhat high probability too and we should expect simple life wherever conditions are right. OR Of presumably all intelligent observers we see an extremely young universe, this would imply the universe will likely not harbour much intelligent life in the future or it's current state may be unstable and collapse to one which does not allow intelligent life. And then you can think about the Fermi paradox which implies that intelligent life is rare in the universe (as we see no galaxy spanning civilisations today despite adequate time for them to develop). Seems like there's lots of competing statistical factors to weigh up.
@@WetPig And Earth has only ~600 mio years left of decent habitability, suggesting intelligence is unlikely to happen fast enough. Other sign : There is a handful of tool-using or self-aware species, some lineages dating back to long ago, suggesting that level is somehow common. And yet, only us made it to technology.
I think the main problem with the doomsday argument is that it always applies. If you went pack to the 11th century the doomsday argument would say that humans most likely won't survive to the 14th century. You can make a general version: the doom soon box would be a future with a total of say 1000N people, and the doom late box would be N^2 or something like that, where N is the total number of humans born up to that point. Then the doomsday argument always tells you to pick the doom soon box, regardless of N. Assuming that N has throughout human history taken most values between 1 and what it is right now the doomsday argument has failed around sqrt(107 billion) times and never succeeded. So it probably should not be trusted.
swc1355 if I remember high school mythology class correctly, kratos was a minor Greek god (personified strength or valor or something like that) and I think Mimir was Norse (perhaps beheaded by Odin?) so I like the idea of them somehow meeting and chatting about the nature of their respective pantheons. Do you reference Búri (or perhaps Odin) specifically when you name “the Allfather” or are you imagining some kind of Zeus/Odin hybrid?
@@John-jc3ty I don't know but maybe I should binge watch Pokemon so that I find out. Honestly I don't know why I never watched it but it could be because it first came out when I was in High school when I was in that "I'm a big boy now" phase so I keep thinking of it as to childish even tho adult me watches MLP.
a microbe, sometime ago: "It is an incontrovertible fact that all life on the planet that has ever existed consists purely of unicellular chemotrophic prokaryotes like ourselves; therefore it is most likely we are in the midpoint of life as we know it, and should not assume that any great change will come to pass in the distant future."
And maybe that's exactly what happened in the overwhelming majority of their possible futures of the quantum multiverse. But since we are conscious observers we have to (based on the anthropic principle) be in one of the rare ones which lead to the evolution fo huge eukaryotic multicellular things with brains..
I don't know if it goes here but I want to get it down while I think about it. The problem with this argument is that although it's true that by randomly selecting from either box from outside, I am more likely to pick ball #5 from the Box with only ten balls, that's not actually the premise implicit in this argument.. You're not randomly selecting a ball from any box. You're electing from an ordered list ball #1, then #2, Then #3, et al.... If I have a mechanism that randomly delivers to me the #5 ball from one of a number of all possible boxes, that doesn't give me *any* information about which box it came from or even how many boxes there are, it only tells me that there are boxes with at least five balls. It's similar to the Monty Hall problem - once you realize that once you have more information it's not random. it fits.
Problem with the entire doomsday argument is the idea that we just randomly ask the question at some point during humanity's existence, rather than the question itself being tied to specific pre-conditions which cannot be statistically averaged out. In reality we ask the question at the first point the philosophical and scientific basis for forming the question become settled. It stops being analogous to the box situation because the box situation is independent of the person drawing, IE the contents of box isn't affected by the background of the person pulling from it. With the Doomsday argument the number of the ball we draw will be influenced by our drawing itself, because we will always draw roughly the same number because we would always ask the question around the same point in our development. To me this must mean our drawn number can have no relation to the number of possible numbers higher because we must draw roughly the same number regardless of how many numbers are too come. I really don't think the Doomsday argument works, not because the statistical argument is bunk at its core, but because it fails to take into account the reality of situation, which is what causes the question to be asked in a given time and by a given observer. It ends up making a seriously unfounded assumption unintentionally, which is that the first observer to ask the question is halfway through the lifespan of his or her species. This is not intended or supported by anything, but it is the natural outcome of assuming that an observer is statistically average across all parameters, ignoring whether those parameters make sense to average out. Imagine the first observer to form this argument in a universe where humanity lives until the heat death of the universe. That observer would still form this argument now, and not in a trillion trillion trillion etc years. Imagine the first observer to form this argument in a universe where humanity lives until tomorrow. That observer would form that argument now and not thousands of years ago. The end of humanity has no relation to us forming this argument, because the argument is not tied to the end or averages over humanity's lifespan. It is tied to specific developmental steps we must always make around the same time in either scenario.
The Doomsday argument is bunk but not for the reason that you describe, nor any of the reasons described in the video. To be honest, I don't even understand your argument. From this point on, every future generation of humans will be aware of the Doomsday argument since it's already been formulated and, if nothing else, its knowledge will be passed down with every generation; and, if not, it's a pretty simple argument, so we should definitely expect it to be thought of independently, especially by more advanced civilisations (such as future humans). So sure, people a trillion trillion years from now will be aware of the Doomsday argument. But anyway, the reference class argument is just stupid. It's pretty obvious the reference class is "any observer capable of formulating the Doomsday argument"; the situation is analogous to Weinberg's cosmological constant estimate, or to any argument based on the anthropic principle. The actual problem with the Doomsday argument is Bostrom's version of the self-sampling assumption; specifically, the assumption that the future can be sampled from with the same probability distribution as the past and present. It's actually not that hard to refute this assumption. Consider the following example: There are 2 boxes, each containing consecutively numbered balls starting from number 1, all randomly shuffled. Box #1 contains 10 balls, while box #2 contains 100,000. However, in box #2, 99,999 of the balls are microscopic in size, while the ball numbered 5 is almost the size of the entire box. You are then presented with a box, but you don't know if it's box #1 or #2. You have to open the box and draw the first ball that your hand touches. You draw ball number 5. Which box did you pluck it from? The doomsday argument claims it's overwhelmingly likely you picked it from box #1. However, that's obviously not true, because the probability distribution of picking each of the balls in box #2 is not uniform. Similarly, the present has an obvious impact on the future. For example, if we wanted to, we could all just commit suicide, thus reducing the probability of our birth rank percentile NOT being extremely high (close to 100%) to 0. Alternatively, we could all start reproducing as proactively as we possibly could, thus artificially raising the probability of our birth rank percentile being very low to 1. Clearly, because the future is not independent of the present, we cannot assume that sampling from all past, present, and future states would yield a uniform distribution. We could if we assumed e.g. that the future already exists, but clearly, it doesn't.
@@maxkho00u guys talk alot about the what ifs and coupda u should focus on the death spiral the world's in right now. I'd give us 8-10 years max before the next nuke is dropped. It's about obvious as day. No I'm not some conspiracy nut, although I could show nutty proof from Bible that could back my claim I don't even need that. There's enough physical evidence in the world today that you don't need faith in God to see it. You just need to be a morally good person and watch the world news.
It's actually because the software they use for chroma-keying (removing the green screen background) can't decide whether that shade of orange is a transculent red on a green background, or, something actually orange.
That's meant as a special treat for his Patreon members. I heard rumours that for quasar level contributors he does weekly pole dancing sessions over on twitch
"Coming from Australia where it swings between 5000 degree heat and raining... spiders! I do envy the consistency of your 17 different types of drizzle!" Wrecked lmaooo
Solipsism doesn't say that I am all that exists, just that all I can be certain to exist. Even in solipsism it is still possible that there is a world outside my head that is roughly how I experience it to be, even though I may not be able to be certain that the outside world exists.
"I, for one welcome the doomsday if it means graduating out of our reference class into some sort of cybernetic, gene-spliced ultra-human." thank you :)
I'm 61. By the doomsday argument, I should expect to age 122. On the other hand, when I was 12, I should have expected to die at 24. On the third hand, actuaries would have called both of those predictions extremely unlikely. So ... maybe there's a problem with that logic.
Agreed, how would you argue, in the events of multiple repition? "Why do I agree to your comment"? Because human is unique, not statistics of groups in my opinion. Tho I am not sure of the single event you're describing.
Actually you can assume that it has not happened once but many times for each species that existed on earth. You'll then realize than the "doom late or doom early" doomsday argument is invalid by noting that every species on earth, including bacteria in petri dishes, grows to fill a niche. That niche is defined by what that can species can exploit. Since by that principle, humans are planning to exploit the planets on our solar system, and possibly the planets on our galaxy, then we might actually be only at the very start of our march to our doom millions of years hence.
Do the rocks observe the universe? When one rock hits another, they interact, one slows down, the other speeds up. Are we not just a more complex example of this. I’m a biochemist. All that happens in out bodies is just tiny bits hitting each other, interacting according to the laws of physics. With a predictable outcome, like the rock? Maybe. What really is an observer.
In quantum physics, any interaction of any systems that cause the future evolution of those systems to in some way depend on that interaction constitutes an observation. So yes, rocks are observers, as are electrons and quarks and Geiger counters and stars and galaxies.
In Quantum Mechanics it's something that tends to align the density matrix into a diagonal form. This happens most readily when large complex systems interact with something. So, from that perspective, a rock is less of an observer than something like a brain, but not "zero of an observer" (though there are "zero-observer" interactions).
@@inquaanate2393 Without changing the laws of physics, I don't think so. If you're willing to change the laws of physics, then of course you can - you could just have a universe with nothing in it at all.
There is a huge glaring problem here: the two boxes were already filled. The Doom Soon and Doom Late boxes, at this point in time, have the same amount of people in them. Until quantum uncertainty determines if a brilliant physicist figures how to thwart the Einsteinian Tyranny of Relativity, or not, we must assume that we are in both... Unless we want a causality entanglement on our hands.
Mad cuz oceans don’t act like droplets of water. Keep hating Einstein cuz he figured it all out, god never plays dice with oceans, we NEED to study the droplets. To do that we need 2billion dollar particle accelerators
The doomsday argument says that the 10th human was one of only 20 who would ever be born. The problem with the argument is that it is a rolling estimate which _always_ says we're probably about half-way along the line to our species' extinction.
Ok, so we know there were 100 billion people. Assume we are in the exact middle and there will ever be only 200 billion people in total. So the 10th guy is obviously wrong thinking he's in the middle. But considering there is 200 billion people he's only in the extreme minority of people who would get such bad result. Majority of people would get an estimate which is much closer to the actual truth..
The funny thing about the Anthropic Principle is that, for a universe so finely tuned to support life, it doesn't seem to produce very much of it, and it took a long time to produce the little we know about. Maybe it isn't so finely tuned to that purpose, and we've just popped up as an exception. Maybe there are other universes that are far better tuned for life that are teeming with it.
"... Ten years later when dark energy was discovered...". Isn't discovered too strong of a term? Dark Energy is really a term to encapsulate symptoms we observe related to expansion. That expansion of which is still under great study as to what is a current valid metric. Not to mention that we have also made assumptions that calculations of a previous age are even close to accurate.
I think it’s fair to say that if there is an observed acceleration, even if the particulars of how it works we have entirely wrong, there has to be an energy which we have discovered.
@@Nosirrbro agreed. But with the variation in results, it seems the perceived expansion could actually turn out to be instead an increase in zero point energy reducing the flow of relativistic particles. Then we realize the symptom was not viewed correctly. Following the definition becomes useless. And yet it had become so ingrained into the field of physics that generations pass and still it is not abandoned. For instance, Einstein's General Relativity shows that gravity is a bending of spacetime, and not to be confused with a force. Yet still today, gravity is listed as one of the four main forces, and described as the least known forces. People still spend their time trying to rectify it as a field in QFT (separate from spacetime), or try their hardest to detect a particle for gravity as though it would be named a graviton. That's a century of not understanding Einstein, and it continues.
@@b.griffin317 Given the robust, tested GR which replaces Newton's laws whenever more than a rough calculation is needed; the answer is invariably no. He was onto something. His equations are still useful for many simple cases. His part has been great for Physics in our version of intelligent evolution. However, his definitions also lend themselves to be a main culprit that we still gloss over Einstein's explanation that curvature of spacetime eliminates gravity as a force.
As a follow-up concept. There is an issue with comparing the complex nature of observing and calculating universe expansion versus the relatively simple anecdote of an apple falling on Newton's head. If Newton can be a little off when writing down laws regarding that simple anecdote, is it meaningful to even create a word "Dark Energy" or "Dark Matter". The best definition to give those is, things which we have not directly discovered but some observations lend credence to it's existence. It is defined as having discovered the things which have not been discovered yet. It'll be less meaningful if it turns out there are two or more distinct components to dark matter, or entirely meaningless if dark matter is ruled out with a breakthrough in knowledge about the effects of curvature of spacetime, gravitational effects.
In the numbered balls problem there is a 1 in 10 change of picking #5 from the box of 10, but there is also a 1 in 10 chance of picking a number in the 1-10 set in the box of 100.
All of these interpretations sound like the "why me?" question people ask when they are the 1 in a 10 million person hit by a tornado, or in the opposite case the lucky winner to the lottery. If something is going to/must happen, no matter how unlikely, that person is going to say "why me?". IE: If physics says something special must happen, then the special individual shouldn't be all that surprised...
But in a lottery, you can say: Well I've won, but there are millions of people who didn't win. In these observations, it's like we are the only contesters and we have won. The first case is perfectly normal, the second case is a bit weird. From this, we are trying to conclude that there must be thousands of others who didn't win, which sounds pretty logical to me.
@@danielmihalik2785 No. In these observations we are the only *remaining* contestants, because we won. As for the future, we can probabilistically estimate that almost everyone loses, but as long as there is at least one winner, observation of the contest is certain to continue.
@@danielmihalik2785 Or, alternatively, we can conclude that we didn't "win" any lottery and there are several other lifeforms also not "winning" their lotteries and that's why we haven't contacted aliens. Why assume we did win and several others lost?
mid-video though (I edit if you talk about it) : The argument of the two box is wrong. With that scenario, we can only found for sure if we are in the second box. Only one pickup of a shared element can't give you any useful informations. Yes they are more chance to pick 5 in the first one than in the second but we still need to pick a random element. If we continue to pickup a ball after replacing the previous one in the box, we still can't confirm the first box. Like the boltzmann brain, we can pickup 89676878/76 balls that are common of the two box and endup with just an statistical intuition on the result but without any full confidence. As for the doomsday argument, we are in a similar wrong assumption, we are picking up ourself. As we don't take someone from the future, we can't get more confidence than a roman citizen at Pompeii that may think the end is near and die in the eruption two years later.
@@kyjo72682 because you can only assume the answer based on statistic if you take more than once. The first pick don't provide any useful informations, you may be in a typical solution or a really particular one. But you can't know that with only one measure.
@@Tutul_ But you are more likely to be a typical member (e.g. in the middle 90 %) and less likely to be a paticular one (e.g. among the first 5 % or the last 5 %). Therefore if you pick number 100 billion it is more likely that the box has 200 billion total rather than 20 trillion or 105 billion.
I think the problem with picking a human out of box doesn't work unless you roll all of the past and future into a single point in time. Otherwise you can't compare something that changes over time to a static box of balls. You'd have to drop a ball (or balls) into each box over time and grab a ball out of a box at a random interval before all the balls have been placed in the boxes. Without the time component accounted for, I don't think the comparison between a box of balls and the number of all humans of that will ever exist can be made.
It is actually equally likely that the number 5 was pick from either box because it exists in both boxes. One lesson I learnt is that when dealing with probability, relying on illusion of human intuition can lead you to fallacies.
This is why I hate the argument from probability. Take a person born as one of the first 1000 human beings. The odds of you having been born this early in the 100,000,000 people future of human kind is 1 in 1,000,000 _(check my calculation, mental maths is not my strong suit)._ It is most likely that the hypothetical human is living in the highest populated point in human history. _Therefore, humanity went extinct a million years ago._ The anthropic principal just *proved* that we dont exist!!! The chance of me being born in Edinburgh during the early 00s is so infinatecimally small that logically I was never born at all. And yet, despite the best efforts of probobility, here I am.
@@joegillian314 that is the whole point. We should may be not assume we are in an average situation. They are more "exceptional" situations than average ones.
I used to wonder why I wasnt born in a different time, or a different country. Eventually I decided that it would be impossible to experience being alive as a different person, because it wouldnt be me, it would be the different person. It's not like you exist as a soul that picks a body at random from all of space and time to inhabit, you are intrinsic to your physical body.
on the ball from the box thought experiment: - you choose a ball numbered 11 or higher, which box did you choose from? 100% the 1000 ball box and 0% the 10 ball box - now, you choose a ball, you know it has a number on it, but you don't know which number exactly... which box did you most likely choose from now?
The self sampling assumption is a way to make a good guess when you lack additional information (which is essentially what the "all else being equal" clause means). Similarly, the doomsday argument is a good guess for a species' lifespan if you lack additional information. The reason the doomsday argument seems silly is because as individuals (and as a species) we have tons of additional information and we can probably use it to make a much better guess.
No, the Doomsday argument is not a good method. Under Doomsday argument logic, the most likely time for humans to go extinct is right this second, before any additional humans are born, because that's the smallest possible metaphorical ball box.
@@Vo_Siri I think you misunderstood my comment. I elaborate my initial comment into 2 points below: 1. The logic underpinning the doomsday argument is not flawed. For example, if you were presented with a hypothetical scenario with a different species in a different universe with different laws of physics where the only info you had was the total number of beings who lived so far in that species. Then the doomsday argument with the largest metaphorical box allowed by your info would be your best guess. It would be a bad guess, probably, the best you can make with so little info. 2. Meanwhile in our current scenario, humanity in our current universe, the doomsday argument is not even close to being the 'best guess' because we have a relatively huge amount of info about ourselves, our universe, physics, etc. We can use this info to make a significantly better guess. The reason I am making these two points in this order is to illustrate *why* the doomsday argument is not an appropriate guess for humanity. The logic is fine, but we fail the "all else being equal" premise. If you pass the "all else being equal" then the doomsday argument is a fine guess.
@@SpeedOfDarknesss I can't agree. The only correct answer to the question of "How can you most accurately calculate when a clade is likely to go extinct based solely on its current population" is "You can't, that's not how it works".
@@Vo_Siri The whole premise is that want to make the best guess possible with the info you have. You can certainly argue that the guess is so bad that it's not worth making, but at that point you're basically just refusing the entertain the thought experiment lol
Why am I a more privileged "random observer" than anyone in the past? St Augustine could have made the same argument, and he would have found the world to have ended by now. So if the argument doesn't hold for past observers, why would it hold for present observers?
Totally agree on that logic, I was about to write about the same thing. Not sure if St Augustine lived enough years from now to possibly have concluded such a near doomsday, but yeah.
Because the St Augustine would be one of many observers and from our perspective he was alerady there thus the assumption of doomsday argument still holds up. Or I am stupid and I don't know what am I saying.
Exactly... Such statistical logic holds ONLY if you know the sum of probabilities. In this case from a SINGLE sample you try to assume the sum of all samples in all scerarios. It it far below the level of charlatan reasoning. "This episode was sponsored by the Doomology cult. Join today, because there is no tomorrow!"
I think the point really is that the longer something exists, the less time it has left. A 1 year old child is probably going to live longer than a 87 year old.
Natibe_ global warming is a hoax and you are an idiot who doesn’t do research for themselves. Look up how much CO2 America produces and then look up how much one volcano produces. Seriously, do it.
Matt Drees climate.nasa.gov/faq/42/what-do-volcanoes-have-to-do-with-climate-change/. Plz cite sources when making claims, or you’re going to get laughed at.
Matt Drees If you did any research you would realise that worldwide annually, just counting cars alone, volcanoes produce less than 1% of all CO2 that cars produce. If you’re so thick as to think one country in the world is the problem then you’re just thick and I pity everyone who lives around you
@@broskiezISMYGAMERTAG I googled it. this was the first result: According to a decade-long study (deepcarbon.net/scientists-quantify-global-volcanic-co2-venting-estimate-total-carbon-earth) by an international team of researchers, human CO2 emissions total 100 times more than the planet-warming effects of *all volcanoes combined*. The total amount emitted by volcanoes is only about 0.3 gigatons a year - a tiny fraction of the 37 gigatons humankind produced in 2018 alone.
I think the correct reference class is "beings that can come up with the doomsday argument" which would have to also include any potential aliens across all of spacetime.
Exactly, and a lot of people who would've applied the doomsday argument before would've been proven wrong (if you would've applied it 50 years ago you would've been wrong.
TheNovaSaber Yes, just as we can use this argument to show that humans can't live up to the year 3000, the people in the year 1000 could use this argument to show that we can't live up to the year 2000. In fact I find the whole reasoning leading to the argument improper. In the original scenario, he gave us 2 boxes, one with numbers 1 to 10, another with numbers 1 to 1000. When one calculates the probability of finding a 5 in each box, one can conclude that the 1st box has 1/10 probability for it, while the 2nd one has 1/1000 probability. But when one asks the question, how much probability is there of finding the number 5 in box 1 versus box 2, then one can say there is 50% chance of being in box 1 and 50% chance of being in box 2. My reasoning is that there is one 5 in box 1 and one 5 in box 2 and we have to pick one so 50-50. Though I know I didn't apply probability theory correctly, it could be that probability theory does not model reality exactly.
The argument presented in this video cannot give you any prediction, because it fails to quantify prior probabilities. To see what I mean, let's say there's 10^10 "late doom" scenarios for every "near doom" scenario. After applying the doomsday argument, you have 50/50 odds of being in one of the the rare "near doom" vs the much more common "late doom" scenario. "Near doom" is also quite relative. Notice the anthropic principle does not assume that the reference class is homogenous when it comes to livespans. It may very well be that you are among the last humans ever born. Yet you might still personally witness death of last stars and nostalgically remember that event as "the good old days", while you farm black holes for hawking radiation bajillion years later - trends in life expectancy point in that direction.
I'd refine that to say "among the last humans to ever live" since if we get infinite lifespan thanks to medtech, humans would still continue to be born for maybe billions of years.
@@KubeSquared I specifically said "born" because the doomsday argument, as I understand it is concerned with order of birth. My point was that, even though you expect the same amount of people being born prior and after your birth, that does not actually put an upper limit on how long civilisation is expected to last.
I love the second idea very interesting! Like you said it it wouldn't refute the doomsday argument though since from what I got form the video it doesn't use years but population size as a metric. Regarding your first point: I believe that is taken into account in the doomsday argument. You could argue that some doomsday scenarios impose a greater threat but you could also make the argument that we have to overcome all of those near doom scenarios just to get to a late doom scenario.
@@niklas5771 Except you're assuming that those "near doom" scenarios are at all likely. In the box example, the 50/50 odds of picking each box skews the odds of getting each ball in the "small" box all the way up to 5%. But if you were to just take a random ball without the context of the box, suddenly they're all equally likely. Heck, you could make the "large" box happen 99.9% of the time, and suddenly 1-10 would be more likely to have come from the large box! You must apply this same thinking here: out of all the civilizations that reach our current state, how many become galactic civilizations? We can't possibly know that, as we are the only civilization we've ever seen. Maybe none do, or maybe almost all do. Either way, our current place means that we have a shot at the title. Whether we succeed is to be determined.
that's the same thing I say when I hear people screaming how the world is going to end in 10 years from climate change. Humans are the most adaptable species this planet has ever produced. it is great to look for solutions to big problems, but saying that humanity is going to be extinct from it is absurd.
@@alexvalin9085 I agree completely. Some of my most talented friends have developed a very depressing outlook on the future of humanity. I believe in our ability to do most anything given enough time. And as long as we don't ALL die, we can always just start over.
I find the overwhelming amount of certainty possible in the two box thought experiment intriguing. For numbers from 11 to 1000 you would have absolute certainty. It's only for numbers 10 and below that uncertainty enters that picture and then only drops to 50%, forcing us now to rely on probability.
.well no matter what Each day that passes it gets closer and closer. So sooner rather than later. If you go by that logic. But I personally I prefer it switched.
No, only assumption is that your birth order is typical. So if humanity keeps expanding before the doom, then we should be typical humans and are likely to be in the middle of the order somewhere, and therefore closer to the end than the beginning.
Those are simplifications to better understand the concept. For all we care, you can assume they are defined as any two possible futures that were equally likely before you were born (i.e. before you "picked a ball").
Personally I feel that cybernetic future stuff is making the wrong assumption that humans have stopped evolving, which just isn't the case. Selection of partners is still very much going on and there's plenty of people who never find a mater to have kids with. As long as that is the case + diseases sorting people out, humanity is very much evolving like any other species and there's no need for cybernetics to predict that humans might be very different in the future, depending also on how much our environment will change.
@@LeutnantJoker all the gensplicing+kybernetic ultra human thing, is less about "humas are a done evolving" and more about "k nature you are slow af ... i handle that now". Evolution is a slow random process and humanity isnt to far off to speed the process up tremendously while at the same aim for more specific results. Doesnt mean its a good think, doesnt man its a bad thing, its just a different thing.
@@LeutnantJoker Yeah, no. Even though evolution is still going on, cybernetics will eventually be an extremely useful lifestyle improvement. It's a safe bet to say humans will have more cybernetic parts in the future.
@skOsH What does a feeling of dissociation from yourself have to do with philosophy, specifically epistemiology? Are you saying that Zen Buddhism is all about being ignorant about what is going on behind your back?
No because you need to take into account your reference class. You are using technology, internet and a certain education level to be able to write English for you to be able to write this post. Therefor you are most likely to be a white person from a first world country. This is exactly why it's so important to take into account the reference class as you need to take into account the factors that lets you ask the question in the first place. Entities without the intelligence to ask this (Like animals or simple AI) are not going to ask this question so shouldn't be counted. People that don't have the education to ask this question (children or poor illiterate people) should also not be counted. If you keep filtering like that you'll eventually only keep first world white person which you most likely are. And again this refined anthropic principle only says what the most likely option will be. There will always be outliers. The chance of that happening is just lower so you should always assume to be the average (while accounting for you being able to ask the question) unless proven otherwise.
@@joey199412 But that's exactly my point, the doomsday argument doesn't consider anything but beeing a cognitive beeing asking that question. It is utterly oversimplified. I can make the almost same argument in favour of beeing part of a species that will conquer the galaxy by changing the argument a bit: namely instead of heaving two bins we now have every possible bin: i.e. one that has only one idividual until extinction, one that has two and so on up until infinity. Now If you choose a random individual which is more likely, the individual was part of one of the 200B bins that ends before that, or one of the infinitly many bins that don't. Say I'm individual #2, am I part of the 9 possible bins that will go extinct before 10 individuals or 200 bins that will be extinct between 800 and 1000 individuals or 20000 bins that will be extinct between 80000-100000 individuals. You get the idea.
I'm a Christian, and an evolutionary biologist, and I am dismayed that so many people equate my faith with these... 'intellectually challenged people's'... 'ideas'. It is a shame that minority which screams loudest seems to make the image of the entire population, at least in some countries.
Those are "Young Earth Creationists", not Christians. It's a tiny group that chooses to take literally what even the rest of scripture does not. Christians are the majority in much of the western world, yet evolution, the 4.5 billion year age of the planet and approximately 14 billion year age of the universe are well accepted. It shouldn't be hard for you to figure out that you're just being bigoted when you assume this stupidity onto an entire group of people.
It seems to me that this doomsday scenario is extremely flawed, is missing so many variables and making baseless assumptions that are heavily biased towards our past. It's a nice thought experiment but is of little to no concrete value. First off, how can you know the median value of total human beings throughout time, when you don't know when the last human to ever live will be born? If you assume that humans will go on for roughly the same time we have been here, what are you basing this off? After all, human history is a tiny fraction of earth history. We could go extinct in the next 100 years with climate change or AI, in hundreds of millions of years when the sun renders earth inhabitable, in tens of billions of years if we manage to colonize our galaxy, ...etc. How is the doomsday model accounting for any of this? You can also project this line of reasoning to another time in human history when we were far less and less advanced that our growth rate was lower than it is today, if you apply the same ideas based on their data you could find that humans should already be extinct and only reach 1,000,000 individuals throughout our history. While making educated assumptions can be useful, when you are making assumptions based on assumptions (which are arbitrarily set for simplicity purposes), what kind of error margins do you get?
The flaw is more basic than that. Fact is, we're simply not being randomly selected from a pool of possible people. In any species-wide time-line, all of the currently living people will be forced to exist along that time-line. The "numbered balls from boxes" experiment has the boxes be totally independent from each other. Our past is not independent from our present and future, though. The latter is contingent on the former.
The argument is not fleshed out here and also uses the least conservative assumptions to produce quite an early figure of year 3000, the confidence and assumptions are not shown also. There are indeed wide error bars in these predictions which reflect our lack of surety in the underlying assumptions. A commonly cited prediction: John Leslie's prediction puts doomsday within ~10k years with 95% confidence with assumption of a steady life expectancy of ~80y and world population stabalisation at ~10B. All the mechanisms you list can be built into the model as priors, if you feel they can be confidently added in. The standard doomsday argument works off flat priors, i.e. it does not bias any hypothetical future over any other. I've seen many criticisms of this argument but most only modify it or change it's predictions without refuting the core message. The real takeaway is not that humanity will die in yr3000 but more that intergalactic civilisation with many-trillion population is very unlikely no matter what priors you chuck into the calculation. The only way around is drastic modification such as ascending to higher forms of life, very dramatic population reduction for very long periods, etc. To link the the box example in the video: You are the ball that is pulled from the box, the boxes are hypothetical scenarios. In this case with a ball number of 5, it is vastly more likely that the ball originated from the 1-10 box (in fact application of Bayes theorem shows the probability of originating from box one in this case is about 99%- assuming there is a 50-50 chance for each box to be chosen). You refer to our earlier ancestors but by definition if all humans applied the principle with a 90% confidence, exactly 10% of our earliest ancestors would be incorrect and the remaining 90% would be correct. So with the correct error accounted for you can make a safe bet.
Why i love the anthropic principle. It's one of the few things left i find almost magical. It predicted the cosmological constant, the doomsday argument, and should be taken seriously when talking about boltzmann brains,simulation theory, ect. I also use this reasoning to find that we are most likely to find ourselves in the most likely universe we should find ourselves in; a cyclic universe, as there are infinitely more chances to find ourselves in a cyclic one as opposed to a one off universe. Coupled with statistics-any chance over infinite time is guaranteed to happen again. Apriori, you know your life is a possibility because you lived it. Therefore, you'll most likely read this again.
Unless it's about AI. That's one we won't stop without a serious investment in prevention. Prevention no one actually knows how to do yet. Because AI can't just not be made, too many governments and companies are into it. Whelp.
Pretty sure a good scientist will doubt everything... So much so we question everything; science can't advance with people that think the current theories, hypothesis etc are correct all the time.
Just a question: can’t the Doomsday Argument be used nearly everywhere? For example, let’s use cake- 🍰 Assuming that there are two scenarios, one with the total number of cakes made so far, and another with all the cakes that will ever and have been ever made. Using the argument implies a more likely chance that the cake I made today would be the last cake ever made, rather than one out all the billions of cakes that will ever be made. Frankly the fact that it can be used for nearly anything, and will give you the same result makes me discount this immediately.
You are actually using it wrong here. It's far more likely that the cake you've made is at the exact average. So the amount of cakes made in the past and the amount that will be made in the future will be about the same. In fact specifically it states that your cake being the last one made is almost impossible and it's far more likely that trillions of cakes will come afterwards. It trends towards everything being as "average" as possible which means being at the exact middle of the total distribution of cakes/people/things that will ever exist in the universe. The more it goes towards the start (first cake/human/thing) or towards the end (last cake/human/thing) the more unlikely it becomes. So the chance that your cake will be the last one is almost 0% chance according to this thing. You have misinterpreted the usage of it.
You can't use that argument because there's no observer selection effect on cakes. The reason the anthropic argument is invoked in the context of observers is that the observers are in their own reference class and the actual meaning of probability is tied to that fact. When that observer then goes on to observe a cake, now the observance of the cake is not bayesian evidence for future cakes in the same way to invoke the anthropic argument. Unfortunately I have to say you're just applying it wrong here.
We still have 100,000 years of humanity left, but if we all work together I think we can bring it down to 50!!! C'mon!
America is currently trying to destroy the world.
@Romulas Ex Well, their plutocratic class but their uneducated elected a wannabe dictator who clearly doesnt care about the environment or the 7 billion people who live on the planet
You mean raise it to 50!!! ? Because 50!!! is much greater than 100000
think of the probem as -you live in a rental skyscaper -Everyone in that builning has a nuke and the norm is You or any disturbance of any kind is a reson let it get off -So the problem descibed is ..Why are you imagining or beliving in the future is now forverever and You wonder How long you the mankind in the house will live/survive .Every tenat ahs children and their children has the nuke -so with 1000 appartments and 1000 years -so how long would it take before one hits the trigger for no reason other than paranoia ..boredome or reson whatever .. not long .after 3 generation they are dead and we are now in the second
This kind of analysis, if valid, tells us the result -- so we can't change it ;)
When I finished watching the video I realized that the very fact I've successfully finished watching the 18-min video has moved my median position 18 min forward and made our expected doomsday postponed by ~36 minutes. Keep making more videos, please! For our survival.
“Strange events permit themselves the luxury of occurring.”
- Charlie Chan
“A fool and his money are soon parted. A fool and his beliefs are united indefinitely.”
Is Charlie Chan related to Jackie Chan?
@@davidmeehan4486 on the off-chance that was a genuine question, no.
"but in the stone age..." - Chris-chan
Reality takes the least path of resistance. Notice things come up twice or more in a day..
'Never tell me the odds'
- Han Solo
'2,4,6,8,10'
- Me
"Sometimes I just don't understand human behaviour."
"I'm Not Very Optimistic About Our Odds." K2 in Rogue One
@@geradosolusyon511 Yeah, until you admit you were writing in base 9.
LMAO!
I made it through a pandemic at age 47 just to get a mid-life crisis from this video.
Lol, if it lowers your stress, by "making it through the pandemic", you're in the 99.9% majority, since the actual death rate was around 0.1%.
Lol and we're still not through the pandemic
I'm a bit confused about something: Couldn't *any* human born at any point in history make the doomsday argument? A human born 2 million years ago would come to the conclusion that the end of the world is neigh, and so would a human born 2 million years from now. If we accept the reasoning of the doomsday argument, doesn't this just mean that everyone, for all of history, will come to the conclusion that we're all going to die sooner rather than later?
Yes, and every observer can only exist in a timeline in which all previous doomsday arguments were wrong. So don't worry about it and just keep trying our best regardless of what this fishy statistical hypothesis says, because even if the doomsday argument is right, we won't be there to observe it ;)
Pretty much. The difference in logic between the boxes & projecting the extent of human civilization reminds me of the Monty Hall problem*. For the boxes it's simple probability that we make 'safe' assumption of. I find in the 'probable doom' prediction that it's going from self-selection to self-fulfilling prophecy; kinda like how in stories they say that should one have the ability to foresee the future one should avoid reading TOO much into one's own future as projecting further out into the possibility space can be easily confounded by one's personal desires: you aren't predicting it you're making it happen..
I might not have conveyed all that well but I tried 😅 I mention Monty Hall because of how folks if they apply the wrong assumptions, will consistently get it wrong(double down) until you elucidate it via goat repeatedly.
*On a game show you reach the end of the event: shown 3 doors, 1 has a car, 2 have goats, you pick a door, then the host to build suspense opens 1 of the 2 other doors to reveal a goat, then asks "Will you switch or will you stay your choice?": you are twice as likely to win the car if you switch to the 3rd other door: you flip from a 1/3 to 2/3 chance because you have new information, also the host has to know where the car is else he could reveal the car & you could just pick it already.. then again, if it's a really awesome goat...
The end of the world, is indeed, neigh 🐴🐎🐴
And weren't they right? Feel free to ask them. I find it interesting that the doomsday argument predicts the end of the world in 50 years, which is also the time a human who would make such a prediction would still be expected to live. I wonder if there's a hidden link, or I am seeing stuff that just ain't there.
The World as they know it dies with them.
There are 7 billion people on earth alive today, there's also 10 000 000 000 000 000 ants. Since being born a human is so much rarer than being born an ant, we can conclude that we're probably ants hallucinating.
If you conclude that, I bet you are an ant hallucinating.
DTR CS Ants aren’t born, they hatch.
Blissfully Ignorant Right now it’s Queen Elizabeth.
That mindrip is gonna keep me up all night ...
Blissfully Ignorant . Maybe Trumps daughter? That’s after he suspends the constitution and declares himself emperor.
“Luke, you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.”
Damn I got criticized by my elementary teachers for starting my essays with “since the dawn of humanity”. Matt pulls it off like nobody’s business 🧐
Lol - “...17 types of drizzle.”
THIS hitchhiker really knows where their towel's at.
Golden
Ogg the Cro-Magnon: "Bad news, Thag, by statistical method, I calculate our race probably never going to exceed 500,000 total members. We got maybe 200 years left."
lol funny thing is tht species lasted like, half a million years. We should hope to exist as long!!
If you talk to a lottery winner they could use anthropic reasoning to assume winning the lottery is easy because it happened to them. Talk to the millions of losers and they would disagree. The existence of winners doesn't make the odds invalid tho just like the existence of the first .001% of humans doesn't mean that the anthropic argument is wrong.
Just that it's most likely correct for the vast majority of humans that make it.
I read that about 70,000 years ago, humanity almost was wiped out from a super-volcano. Knocked us down to about 10,000 in population.
@@peaceonearth351
That was just my grandfather farting.
@@TheCimbrianBull I see the resemblance. Lol
Step 1: Define reference class as "homo sapiens sapiens existing concurrently with the internet".
Step 2: Observe that the internet has existed approximately 30 years.
Step 3: Assume self-sampling principle makes sense and internet access is bell curved over the duration of its existence or skewed towards late-phase access...
The internet's going to cease to exist some time in the next 30 years guys.
Agreed.
Seeems right 🤷♀️🧖♀️
That's why I'm storing porns.
And that it, chindren, you don't allow philosophers into scientific areas. Grab your pitchforks and torches!
@@ShadeAKAhayate They have already infiltrated cosmology pretty hard though.
6:44 Doom Soon and Doom Late, but what about Doom Eternal?
Eternal Soon!
2020
Is that where a demon has to figure out how long it will be before a large angry man in green armor tears its arm off and beats it to death with it?
That would be what religion wants you to believe. Makes dying sound so much better than it actually is !!!!
Since it got pushed back to march, we are already in teh "Doom Late" scenario
The difference between the numbered ball analogy and the universe is that both sets of balls exist, whereas there might not be another universe. You're not sampling your existence from both universes if there is only one, in which case your rank is equally likely to be in the middle, beginning or the very last one.
Understanding 1% of this video.
Me: “knowledge is power”
I accept these comments for certain videos on this channel, but if you actually whatch this one you'll notice that there is nothing hard here to understand.
@@pierfrancescopeperoni quite the pretentious comment/weird flex but ok
@@CorgiButter69 ...
@@CorgiButter69 .....
no, ''power is power''
I've been called a hoopy frood by Matt O'Dowd. I can die in peace now. But hopefully farther down the road.
Just be content in that according to the anthropic principal you can assume you are about halfway through your existence.
Do you know where your towel is?
@@LeoStaley You know it.
Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters for everyone!
@@samory2761 great now I'm stuck in a perpetual midlife crisis
If any species became a galactic civilisation, they would come up with this in the early stages
"we're half way along in our species' history, and always will be."
We dont know what we dont know :P
@@randy2811 why is alien life always assumed ultra advanced?? And what us advanced and why would it 'help' us all dumb ideas, aliens most likely represent the most common forms of life on earth , blue green algae, bacteria, viri fungi etc. Except they wouldnt share any bio-dna link with you.... so no help
@@knyghtryder3599 because only advanced alien life counts. 😂😂😂
@@thethirdjegs get ready 2 be sad for ever, the only remote chance of finding something relatable are inter galaxy clusters..... but we wont get there .... maybe one other example in our current cluster but not likely close... good luck
One of my favourite things about this channel is Matt's look of tolerant disappointment on his main page banner :D
Blue steel, magnum, tolerant disappointment.
Shouldn't he be guzzling Tabasco sauce during this video? :)
He knows that we're doing our best.
That description is so spot on I love it :D
Can't we use this argument in a slightly different way for the universe. Isn't it odd that we exist in a universe so young? The universe will according to our current understanding live on for thousands of billions of years, yet it's currently only 13.8 billion years old as we exist.
Glass half full, I like it.
Yeah but if you think about it actually, we are pretty late to the whole life party considering that life was possible since the universe was about 1 billion or so years old, and in a few billion years the universe will die out due to the expansion of it so we dont have a lot of time to spend here
@@codrin8606 The fact we are so early to the whole party would mean there is a big chance that we are the only sufficiently advanced civilization. Imagine only 1 other civilization that beat us by 1 billion years in our own galaxy. Assuming our current rate of technological advancement in 1 billion years we should be an interstellar civilization maybe even an intergalactic one. If our assumptions about the earlier civilization are true, we should have seen signs or even communicated with them. But we haven't.
PS: Just saw that you also used the word "party", I somehow didn't see it the first time I read your comment, but still used it myself :)
You can look at it two ways:
The universe is very early in it's current state yet has produced intelligent life (presumably through some random natural process), hence intelligent life should be somewhat common in the universe throughout it's entire age. Furthermore, simple life appeared very quickly after appropriate conditions appeared on earth so it would appear that this process is somewhat high probability too and we should expect simple life wherever conditions are right.
OR
Of presumably all intelligent observers we see an extremely young universe, this would imply the universe will likely not harbour much intelligent life in the future or it's current state may be unstable and collapse to one which does not allow intelligent life.
And then you can think about the Fermi paradox which implies that intelligent life is rare in the universe (as we see no galaxy spanning civilisations today despite adequate time for them to develop).
Seems like there's lots of competing statistical factors to weigh up.
@@WetPig And Earth has only ~600 mio years left of decent habitability, suggesting intelligence is unlikely to happen fast enough.
Other sign : There is a handful of tool-using or self-aware species, some lineages dating back to long ago, suggesting that level is somehow common. And yet, only us made it to technology.
I think the main problem with the doomsday argument is that it always applies. If you went pack to the 11th century the doomsday argument would say that humans most likely won't survive to the 14th century.
You can make a general version: the doom soon box would be a future with a total of say 1000N people, and the doom late box would be N^2 or something like that, where N is the total number of humans born up to that point. Then the doomsday argument always tells you to pick the doom soon box, regardless of N.
Assuming that N has throughout human history taken most values between 1 and what it is right now the doomsday argument has failed around sqrt(107 billion) times and never succeeded.
So it probably should not be trusted.
Kratos: "Fate is another lie told by the gods."
Mimir: "On that, you and the Allfather may just agree."
swc1355 if I remember high school mythology class correctly, kratos was a minor Greek god (personified strength or valor or something like that) and I think Mimir was Norse (perhaps beheaded by Odin?) so I like the idea of them somehow meeting and chatting about the nature of their respective pantheons. Do you reference Búri (or perhaps Odin) specifically when you name “the Allfather” or are you imagining some kind of Zeus/Odin hybrid?
@@jpe1 It's from the game "God of War". Way too much to explain here, but I think relevant to the video.
@@jpe1 go a play God of War 4. You will bot be disappointed
I feel like my brain is 30 orders of magnitude bigger now.
Also I'm going to go look up what a order of magnitude is.
you know that earth type attack in pokemon that ditto learned
@@John-jc3ty they removed that attack in the latest editions
@@maythesciencebewithyou then this video makes no sense
@@John-jc3ty made my day.
@@John-jc3ty I don't know but maybe I should binge watch Pokemon so that I find out. Honestly I don't know why I never watched it but it could be because it first came out when I was in High school when I was in that "I'm a big boy now" phase so I keep thinking of it as to childish even tho adult me watches MLP.
a microbe, sometime ago:
"It is an incontrovertible fact that all life on the planet that has ever existed consists purely of unicellular chemotrophic prokaryotes like ourselves; therefore it is most likely we are in the midpoint of life as we know it, and should not assume that any great change will come to pass in the distant future."
Ugh, stop fantasizing and get back to protein synthesis.
@synchromorph
*Big Chungus intensifies*
And maybe that's exactly what happened in the overwhelming majority of their possible futures of the quantum multiverse. But since we are conscious observers we have to (based on the anthropic principle) be in one of the rare ones which lead to the evolution fo huge eukaryotic multicellular things with brains..
I don't know if it goes here but I want to get it down while I think about it. The problem with this argument is that although it's true that by randomly selecting from either box from outside, I am more likely to pick ball #5 from the Box with only ten balls, that's not actually the premise implicit in this argument..
You're not randomly selecting a ball from any box. You're electing from an ordered list ball #1, then #2, Then #3, et al.... If I have a mechanism that randomly delivers to me the #5 ball from one of a number of all possible boxes, that doesn't give me *any* information about which box it came from or even how many boxes there are, it only tells me that there are boxes with at least five balls.
It's similar to the Monty Hall problem - once you realize that once you have more information it's not random. it fits.
Problem with the entire doomsday argument is the idea that we just randomly ask the question at some point during humanity's existence, rather than the question itself being tied to specific pre-conditions which cannot be statistically averaged out.
In reality we ask the question at the first point the philosophical and scientific basis for forming the question become settled.
It stops being analogous to the box situation because the box situation is independent of the person drawing, IE the contents of box isn't affected by the background of the person pulling from it. With the Doomsday argument the number of the ball we draw will be influenced by our drawing itself, because we will always draw roughly the same number because we would always ask the question around the same point in our development. To me this must mean our drawn number can have no relation to the number of possible numbers higher because we must draw roughly the same number regardless of how many numbers are too come.
I really don't think the Doomsday argument works, not because the statistical argument is bunk at its core, but because it fails to take into account the reality of situation, which is what causes the question to be asked in a given time and by a given observer. It ends up making a seriously unfounded assumption unintentionally, which is that the first observer to ask the question is halfway through the lifespan of his or her species. This is not intended or supported by anything, but it is the natural outcome of assuming that an observer is statistically average across all parameters, ignoring whether those parameters make sense to average out.
Imagine the first observer to form this argument in a universe where humanity lives until the heat death of the universe. That observer would still form this argument now, and not in a trillion trillion trillion etc years.
Imagine the first observer to form this argument in a universe where humanity lives until tomorrow. That observer would form that argument now and not thousands of years ago.
The end of humanity has no relation to us forming this argument, because the argument is not tied to the end or averages over humanity's lifespan. It is tied to specific developmental steps we must always make around the same time in either scenario.
The Doomsday argument is bunk but not for the reason that you describe, nor any of the reasons described in the video.
To be honest, I don't even understand your argument. From this point on, every future generation of humans will be aware of the Doomsday argument since it's already been formulated and, if nothing else, its knowledge will be passed down with every generation; and, if not, it's a pretty simple argument, so we should definitely expect it to be thought of independently, especially by more advanced civilisations (such as future humans). So sure, people a trillion trillion years from now will be aware of the Doomsday argument.
But anyway, the reference class argument is just stupid. It's pretty obvious the reference class is "any observer capable of formulating the Doomsday argument"; the situation is analogous to Weinberg's cosmological constant estimate, or to any argument based on the anthropic principle.
The actual problem with the Doomsday argument is Bostrom's version of the self-sampling assumption; specifically, the assumption that the future can be sampled from with the same probability distribution as the past and present. It's actually not that hard to refute this assumption. Consider the following example:
There are 2 boxes, each containing consecutively numbered balls starting from number 1, all randomly shuffled. Box #1 contains 10 balls, while box #2 contains 100,000. However, in box #2, 99,999 of the balls are microscopic in size, while the ball numbered 5 is almost the size of the entire box. You are then presented with a box, but you don't know if it's box #1 or #2. You have to open the box and draw the first ball that your hand touches. You draw ball number 5. Which box did you pluck it from? The doomsday argument claims it's overwhelmingly likely you picked it from box #1. However, that's obviously not true, because the probability distribution of picking each of the balls in box #2 is not uniform.
Similarly, the present has an obvious impact on the future. For example, if we wanted to, we could all just commit suicide, thus reducing the probability of our birth rank percentile NOT being extremely high (close to 100%) to 0. Alternatively, we could all start reproducing as proactively as we possibly could, thus artificially raising the probability of our birth rank percentile being very low to 1. Clearly, because the future is not independent of the present, we cannot assume that sampling from all past, present, and future states would yield a uniform distribution. We could if we assumed e.g. that the future already exists, but clearly, it doesn't.
@@maxkho00u guys talk alot about the what ifs and coupda u should focus on the death spiral the world's in right now. I'd give us 8-10 years max before the next nuke is dropped. It's about obvious as day. No I'm not some conspiracy nut, although I could show nutty proof from Bible that could back my claim I don't even need that. There's enough physical evidence in the world today that you don't need faith in God to see it. You just need to be a morally good person and watch the world news.
Everyone in the comment section: *having intellectual discussions*
Me: His shirt changed color at 12:18
the comment responses (almost) always are recorded separately.
Lol, great eye, what is that changing? Are his shirts digital? Matt are you physics-ing neck-ed?
It's actually because the software they use for chroma-keying (removing the green screen background) can't decide whether that shade of orange is a transculent red on a green background, or, something actually orange.
That's meant as a special treat for his Patreon members. I heard rumours that for quasar level contributors he does weekly pole dancing sessions over on twitch
I am so glad that I wasn't imagining this.
In *my* universe, we're living in the "doom _now"_ scenari---
Ah Nnooooooooooooo!
I was going to reply but I realized what a pointless gesture that would be. RIP dude.
In my Universe I play Doom in the evening. I wouldn't mind playing a game now though.
hereticpariah 6/66. [°___°}
F
"To use the anthropic principle properly, we must use it carefully."
YOU'RE NO FUN! 😡
That's the point of the whole channel 😊
If we are the budding years of life’s existence, then the chances are 100% we are in the early stages of life. The others don’t exist yet.
"Coming from Australia where it swings between 5000 degree heat and raining... spiders! I do envy the consistency of your 17 different types of drizzle!" Wrecked lmaooo
Finding videos didn't already see in this channel feels like finding gold.
Solipsism is simpler: if I die, the universe ends.
hey man im desperate do u know pbs spacetimes' discord? i need it ;o
Solipsism doesn't say that I am all that exists, just that all I can be certain to exist. Even in solipsism it is still possible that there is a world outside my head that is roughly how I experience it to be, even though I may not be able to be certain that the outside world exists.
Just EPIC
@@someone2973 Are you very sure your existence is not linked to mine? If you do exist, of course.
Is it solipsistic in here, or is it just me?
"I, for one welcome the doomsday if it means graduating out of our reference class into some sort of cybernetic, gene-spliced ultra-human." thank you :)
@skOsH how would be destroy "our" consciousness creating other "neohumans", and why assume we can do such a thing in the first place?
The second we discover an intelligent alien race, all bets are off.
Do you think that will happen in the next 100 years?
leonard witucke likely, but unsure
@@leonardwitucke1 the chance is almost 0, so don't even consider it
@@leonardwitucke1 Maybe not 100 years but hopfully within the next 500
I'm pretty sure Vegas will disagree. There is no way someone isn't already betting on aliens being discovered.
With the doom early vs doom late box, every observer through history could assume to be near the end of their species.
I'm 61. By the doomsday argument, I should expect to age 122. On the other hand, when I was 12, I should have expected to die at 24. On the third hand, actuaries would have called both of those predictions extremely unlikely. So ... maybe there's a problem with that logic.
You cannot realistically use statistics methods for things, that only happen once.
Not in a frequentist framework
True, but the things being discussed in these episodes don't have any other methods.
Agreed, how would you argue, in the events of multiple repition?
"Why do I agree to your comment"? Because human is unique, not statistics of groups in my opinion. Tho I am not sure of the single event you're describing.
Actually you can assume that it has not happened once but many times for each species that existed on earth. You'll then realize than the "doom late or doom early" doomsday argument is invalid by noting that every species on earth, including bacteria in petri dishes, grows to fill a niche. That niche is defined by what that can species can exploit.
Since by that principle, humans are planning to exploit the planets on our solar system, and possibly the planets on our galaxy, then we might actually be only at the very start of our march to our doom millions of years hence.
Yes, you can.
If there is a bag with 1 red ball and 9 blue balls in and I pick ONE ball out ONCE what is the probability it is red?
Do the rocks observe the universe? When one rock hits another, they interact, one slows down, the other speeds up.
Are we not just a more complex example of this. I’m a biochemist. All that happens in out bodies is just tiny bits hitting each other, interacting according to the laws of physics. With a predictable outcome, like the rock? Maybe.
What really is an observer.
In quantum physics, any interaction of any systems that cause the future evolution of those systems to in some way depend on that interaction constitutes an observation. So yes, rocks are observers, as are electrons and quarks and Geiger counters and stars and galaxies.
In Quantum Mechanics it's something that tends to align the density matrix into a diagonal form. This happens most readily when large complex systems interact with something. So, from that perspective, a rock is less of an observer than something like a brain, but not "zero of an observer" (though there are "zero-observer" interactions).
lrwerewolf blah Modus Ponens so are any universes not capable of containing observers?
@@inquaanate2393 Without changing the laws of physics, I don't think so. If you're willing to change the laws of physics, then of course you can - you could just have a universe with nothing in it at all.
Something that can learn about quantum mechanics at university and think: damn, quantum mechanics sucks
*Merry Christmas EVERYBODY!!*
Yeah, nothing like impending doom to get me in the Christmas spirit!
Woah, a real time traveller!
J Thorsson Shut up and get cheery you grinch
Easiest answer: We dont need trillion humans if we just stop dying.
I agree 100%
Less humans more automation, in whatever form that takes.
Or we all merge into a hyper mind. That's only one observer.
That may not be entirely out of the realm of possibility.
Like i keep telling my team in every video game out there
Uh oh. My angry girlfriend just got home.
I feel like a Doomsday Argument is about to happen.
Did you survive?
Apparently not
My vote is for Doom now. /E1M1 starts playing.
TH-cam recommended this video after I watched PewDiePie talking about Doomsday Argument
There is a huge glaring problem here: the two boxes were already filled. The Doom Soon and Doom Late boxes, at this point in time, have the same amount of people in them. Until quantum uncertainty determines if a brilliant physicist figures how to thwart the Einsteinian Tyranny of Relativity, or not, we must assume that we are in both... Unless we want a causality entanglement on our hands.
Mad cuz oceans don’t act like droplets of water. Keep hating Einstein cuz he figured it all out, god never plays dice with oceans, we NEED to study the droplets. To do that we need 2billion dollar particle accelerators
@@babytime1 You just necroed a two year old comment to let me know you didn't catch the joke....
Kurzgesagt: nobody can give people an existential crisis like me.
PBS Space Time: hold my beer.
"Rains spiders" HAH! Thanks for the laugh.
The doomsday argument says that the 10th human was one of only 20 who would ever be born.
The problem with the argument is that it is a rolling estimate which _always_ says we're probably about half-way along the line to our species' extinction.
Ok, so we know there were 100 billion people. Assume we are in the exact middle and there will ever be only 200 billion people in total. So the 10th guy is obviously wrong thinking he's in the middle. But considering there is 200 billion people he's only in the extreme minority of people who would get such bad result. Majority of people would get an estimate which is much closer to the actual truth..
@@kyjo72682 When there are 100 trillion people, the 100 billion will be a minority.
@@Tfin Yes, if there were 100 trillion, our estimate of 200 billion would be wrong. But we'd still be a tiny minority of people with such bad result.
"Everybody dies*"
* Disclaimer: statement only proven to be 94% accurate.
Actual conversation I had with my coworkers a few weeks ago over slack...
Indeed! So far, all evidence indicates that I, myself, am immortal. After all, I have not died even _once!_
Though it seems accurate to say that by the age of 130, all humans are dead. So far.
“..raining spiders...” 😂😂
This is no joke! www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/05/150518-spiders-australia-silk-webs-animals-environment/
@@RobinDSaunders wow!
The funny thing about the Anthropic Principle is that, for a universe so finely tuned to support life, it doesn't seem to produce very much of it, and it took a long time to produce the little we know about. Maybe it isn't so finely tuned to that purpose, and we've just popped up as an exception. Maybe there are other universes that are far better tuned for life that are teeming with it.
This is easier to understand than to explain, but you did a better job than most I have heard it from.
"... Ten years later when dark energy was discovered...". Isn't discovered too strong of a term? Dark Energy is really a term to encapsulate symptoms we observe related to expansion. That expansion of which is still under great study as to what is a current valid metric. Not to mention that we have also made assumptions that calculations of a previous age are even close to accurate.
I think it’s fair to say that if there is an observed acceleration, even if the particulars of how it works we have entirely wrong, there has to be an energy which we have discovered.
would you saw newton "discovered" gravity? or at least the "laws" of gravity?
@@Nosirrbro agreed. But with the variation in results, it seems the perceived expansion could actually turn out to be instead an increase in zero point energy reducing the flow of relativistic particles. Then we realize the symptom was not viewed correctly. Following the definition becomes useless. And yet it had become so ingrained into the field of physics that generations pass and still it is not abandoned. For instance, Einstein's General Relativity shows that gravity is a bending of spacetime, and not to be confused with a force. Yet still today, gravity is listed as one of the four main forces, and described as the least known forces. People still spend their time trying to rectify it as a field in QFT (separate from spacetime), or try their hardest to detect a particle for gravity as though it would be named a graviton. That's a century of not understanding Einstein, and it continues.
@@b.griffin317 Given the robust, tested GR which replaces Newton's laws whenever more than a rough calculation is needed; the answer is invariably no. He was onto something. His equations are still useful for many simple cases. His part has been great for Physics in our version of intelligent evolution. However, his definitions also lend themselves to be a main culprit that we still gloss over Einstein's explanation that curvature of spacetime eliminates gravity as a force.
As a follow-up concept. There is an issue with comparing the complex nature of observing and calculating universe expansion versus the relatively simple anecdote of an apple falling on Newton's head. If Newton can be a little off when writing down laws regarding that simple anecdote, is it meaningful to even create a word "Dark Energy" or "Dark Matter". The best definition to give those is, things which we have not directly discovered but some observations lend credence to it's existence. It is defined as having discovered the things which have not been discovered yet. It'll be less meaningful if it turns out there are two or more distinct components to dark matter, or entirely meaningless if dark matter is ruled out with a breakthrough in knowledge about the effects of curvature of spacetime, gravitational effects.
I was 30 seconds in when I realized the video is probably almost over
Should rename it "The Dumbsday Argument."
- What's the probability of you to meet a dinosaur tomorrow on your way to work?
- 50%
- How come?
- I will either meet one, or I will not.
My greatest problem with the cosmological constant is that it's not constant.
Some say the world will end with ice,
Others say with fire.
From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire...
world seems pretty chilly to me.
@@b.griffin317 But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
“The world is as cold as you make it.”
@@jovetj Revenge is a dish best served cold.
*@stoeger 2*
...A _song_ of Ice and Fire...?
I have that same shirt. You sir...have excellent taste.
Therefore: if anywhere there exist observers who never die, we are them.
Yes 😁😁!! Jackpod
pretty much...
@Brian Williams You were always you and always will be. After you wake up, you're the same person who went to sleep.
Every body, of any species, is produced from the soul's prior choices. We're all eternal, and not these bodies at all.
@Brian Williams there is one soul. separation is an illusion th-cam.com/video/h6fcK_fRYaI/w-d-xo.html
In the numbered balls problem there is a 1 in 10 change of picking #5 from the box of 10, but there is also a 1 in 10 chance of picking a number in the 1-10 set in the box of 100.
"Coming from Australia, where it swings between 5000 degrees heat and raining spiders" wow 😂😂
All of these interpretations sound like the "why me?" question people ask when they are the 1 in a 10 million person hit by a tornado, or in the opposite case the lucky winner to the lottery. If something is going to/must happen, no matter how unlikely, that person is going to say "why me?". IE: If physics says something special must happen, then the special individual shouldn't be all that surprised...
Why me? Well, maybe because *someone* has to
But in a lottery, you can say: Well I've won, but there are millions of people who didn't win.
In these observations, it's like we are the only contesters and we have won.
The first case is perfectly normal, the second case is a bit weird.
From this, we are trying to conclude that there must be thousands of others who didn't win, which sounds pretty logical to me.
As far as we know, _ONE_ person has been hit by a meteor. In the whole history of humanity.
@@danielmihalik2785 No. In these observations we are the only *remaining* contestants, because we won. As for the future, we can probabilistically estimate that almost everyone loses, but as long as there is at least one winner, observation of the contest is certain to continue.
@@danielmihalik2785 Or, alternatively, we can conclude that we didn't "win" any lottery and there are several other lifeforms also not "winning" their lotteries and that's why we haven't contacted aliens. Why assume we did win and several others lost?
mid-video though (I edit if you talk about it) :
The argument of the two box is wrong. With that scenario, we can only found for sure if we are in the second box. Only one pickup of a shared element can't give you any useful informations. Yes they are more chance to pick 5 in the first one than in the second but we still need to pick a random element. If we continue to pickup a ball after replacing the previous one in the box, we still can't confirm the first box. Like the boltzmann brain, we can pickup 89676878/76 balls that are common of the two box and endup with just an statistical intuition on the result but without any full confidence.
As for the doomsday argument, we are in a similar wrong assumption, we are picking up ourself. As we don't take someone from the future, we can't get more confidence than a roman citizen at Pompeii that may think the end is near and die in the eruption two years later.
Yes, you can't be 100% sure. But if you pick any number between 1 and 10 you can be 99.01% sure you picked from the first box.
@@kyjo72682 not with only one pick.
@@Tutul_ Why? Assuming the pick is random, I don't see how number of attempts is relevant.
@@kyjo72682 because you can only assume the answer based on statistic if you take more than once. The first pick don't provide any useful informations, you may be in a typical solution or a really particular one. But you can't know that with only one measure.
@@Tutul_ But you are more likely to be a typical member (e.g. in the middle 90 %) and less likely to be a paticular one (e.g. among the first 5 % or the last 5 %). Therefore if you pick number 100 billion it is more likely that the box has 200 billion total rather than 20 trillion or 105 billion.
I think the problem with picking a human out of box doesn't work unless you roll all of the past and future into a single point in time. Otherwise you can't compare something that changes over time to a static box of balls. You'd have to drop a ball (or balls) into each box over time and grab a ball out of a box at a random interval before all the balls have been placed in the boxes. Without the time component accounted for, I don't think the comparison between a box of balls and the number of all humans of that will ever exist can be made.
It is actually equally likely that the number 5 was pick from either box because it exists in both boxes. One lesson I learnt is that when dealing with probability, relying on illusion of human intuition can lead you to fallacies.
That two-pronged weather quip had me in stitches, great deadpan delivery as usual!
10:36 I do sometimes wonder if i'm just a tamagotchi contemplating my own existence
Sounds like the possibility of us not existing at all would be infinite.
Therefore God. 🤷🍻💙✝️
@@surfside75 ehh no
Surfside not your Jesus
@@jigsaw2253 that's already out listed as impossible
There is one undeniable truth, “ nothing lasts fo ever” . The religious amongst us tell themselves otherwise in an attempt to allay their fears.
on average every human should assume he is Chinese.
Chinese might have a plurality in terms of population, but the probability of non-Chinese is actually greater.
This is why I hate the argument from probability.
Take a person born as one of the first 1000 human beings. The odds of you having been born this early in the 100,000,000 people future of human kind is 1 in 1,000,000 _(check my calculation, mental maths is not my strong suit)._ It is most likely that the hypothetical human is living in the highest populated point in human history. _Therefore, humanity went extinct a million years ago._ The anthropic principal just *proved* that we dont exist!!!
The chance of me being born in Edinburgh during the early 00s is so infinatecimally small that logically I was never born at all. And yet, despite the best efforts of probobility, here I am.
@@joegillian314 that is the whole point. We should may be not assume we are in an average situation. They are more "exceptional" situations than average ones.
Actually on average every human should assume they are not Chinese
We should not assume anything. You know what happens when you _assume?_ You make an _ass_ out of _u_ and _me._
I used to wonder why I wasnt born in a different time, or a different country. Eventually I decided that it would be impossible to experience being alive as a different person, because it wouldnt be me, it would be the different person. It's not like you exist as a soul that picks a body at random from all of space and time to inhabit, you are intrinsic to your physical body.
I guess this is like saying your 'reference class' is only you, not all of humanity across space and time
on the ball from the box thought experiment:
- you choose a ball numbered 11 or higher, which box did you choose from? 100% the 1000 ball box and 0% the 10 ball box
- now, you choose a ball, you know it has a number on it, but you don't know which number exactly... which box did you most likely choose from now?
The self sampling assumption is a way to make a good guess when you lack additional information (which is essentially what the "all else being equal" clause means). Similarly, the doomsday argument is a good guess for a species' lifespan if you lack additional information. The reason the doomsday argument seems silly is because as individuals (and as a species) we have tons of additional information and we can probably use it to make a much better guess.
No, the Doomsday argument is not a good method. Under Doomsday argument logic, the most likely time for humans to go extinct is right this second, before any additional humans are born, because that's the smallest possible metaphorical ball box.
@@Vo_Siri I think you misunderstood my comment. I elaborate my initial comment into 2 points below:
1. The logic underpinning the doomsday argument is not flawed. For example, if you were presented with a hypothetical scenario with a different species in a different universe with different laws of physics where the only info you had was the total number of beings who lived so far in that species. Then the doomsday argument with the largest metaphorical box allowed by your info would be your best guess. It would be a bad guess, probably, the best you can make with so little info.
2. Meanwhile in our current scenario, humanity in our current universe, the doomsday argument is not even close to being the 'best guess' because we have a relatively huge amount of info about ourselves, our universe, physics, etc. We can use this info to make a significantly better guess.
The reason I am making these two points in this order is to illustrate *why* the doomsday argument is not an appropriate guess for humanity. The logic is fine, but we fail the "all else being equal" premise. If you pass the "all else being equal" then the doomsday argument is a fine guess.
@@SpeedOfDarknesss I can't agree. The only correct answer to the question of "How can you most accurately calculate when a clade is likely to go extinct based solely on its current population" is "You can't, that's not how it works".
@@Vo_Siri The whole premise is that want to make the best guess possible with the info you have. You can certainly argue that the guess is so bad that it's not worth making, but at that point you're basically just refusing the entertain the thought experiment lol
Why am I a more privileged "random observer" than anyone in the past? St Augustine could have made the same argument, and he would have found the world to have ended by now. So if the argument doesn't hold for past observers, why would it hold for present observers?
Totally agree on that logic, I was about to write about the same thing.
Not sure if St Augustine lived enough years from now to possibly have concluded such a near doomsday, but yeah.
Because the St Augustine would be one of many observers and from our perspective he was alerady there thus the assumption of doomsday argument still holds up.
Or I am stupid and I don't know what am I saying.
Exactly... Such statistical logic holds ONLY if you know the sum of probabilities. In this case from a SINGLE sample you try to assume the sum of all samples in all scerarios. It it far below the level of charlatan reasoning.
"This episode was sponsored by the Doomology cult. Join today, because there is no tomorrow!"
i think that just means it becomes less likely to go on much more ...
if one follows the argument
I think the point really is that the longer something exists, the less time it has left.
A 1 year old child is probably going to live longer than a 87 year old.
Doomsday argument: your species will survive until 2300
Boomer politicians: *not if I can help it!*
Natibe_ global warming is a hoax and you are an idiot who doesn’t do research for themselves. Look up how much CO2 America produces and then look up how much one volcano produces. Seriously, do it.
@@broskiezISMYGAMERTAG you are such an uneducated idiot 😂😂😂
Matt Drees climate.nasa.gov/faq/42/what-do-volcanoes-have-to-do-with-climate-change/. Plz cite sources when making claims, or you’re going to get laughed at.
Matt Drees If you did any research you would realise that worldwide annually, just counting cars alone, volcanoes produce less than 1% of all CO2 that cars produce. If you’re so thick as to think one country in the world is the problem then you’re just thick and I pity everyone who lives around you
@@broskiezISMYGAMERTAG I googled it. this was the first result:
According to a decade-long study (deepcarbon.net/scientists-quantify-global-volcanic-co2-venting-estimate-total-carbon-earth) by an international team of researchers, human CO2 emissions total 100 times more than the planet-warming effects of *all volcanoes combined*.
The total amount emitted by volcanoes is only about 0.3 gigatons a year - a tiny fraction of the 37 gigatons humankind produced in 2018 alone.
I think the correct reference class is "beings that can come up with the doomsday argument" which would have to also include any potential aliens across all of spacetime.
Lisa: I feel like I'm going to DIE, Bart.
Bart: We're all gonna die, Lis'. 🤷♂️
Lisa: I meant soon!
Bart: So did I. 😔
Anyone who applied the "doomsday argument" a thousand years ago has already been proven wrong.
TheNovaSaber thousand years ago we thought the earth was flat lmao
Exactly, and a lot of people who would've applied the doomsday argument before would've been proven wrong (if you would've applied it 50 years ago you would've been wrong.
@@LazyBoy306 No, we didn't.
TheNovaSaber Yes, just as we can use this argument to show that humans can't live up to the year 3000, the people in the year 1000 could use this argument to show that we can't live up to the year 2000.
In fact I find the whole reasoning leading to the argument improper. In the original scenario, he gave us 2 boxes, one with numbers 1 to 10, another with numbers 1 to 1000.
When one calculates the probability of finding a 5 in each box, one can conclude that the 1st box has 1/10 probability for it, while the 2nd one has 1/1000 probability.
But when one asks the question, how much probability is there of finding the number 5 in box 1 versus box 2, then one can say there is 50% chance of being in box 1 and 50% chance of being in box 2.
My reasoning is that there is one 5 in box 1 and one 5 in box 2 and we have to pick one so 50-50. Though I know I didn't apply probability theory correctly, it could be that probability theory does not model reality exactly.
@@LazyBoy306 ancient Greeks knew the Earth is round, they even estimated it's circumference. I belive it was Eratosthenes.
The argument presented in this video cannot give you any prediction, because it fails to quantify prior probabilities. To see what I mean, let's say there's 10^10 "late doom" scenarios for every "near doom" scenario. After applying the doomsday argument, you have 50/50 odds of being in one of the the rare "near doom" vs the much more common "late doom" scenario.
"Near doom" is also quite relative. Notice the anthropic principle does not assume that the reference class is homogenous when it comes to livespans. It may very well be that you are among the last humans ever born. Yet you might still personally witness death of last stars and nostalgically remember that event as "the good old days", while you farm black holes for hawking radiation bajillion years later - trends in life expectancy point in that direction.
I'd refine that to say "among the last humans to ever live" since if we get infinite lifespan thanks to medtech, humans would still continue to be born for maybe billions of years.
@@KubeSquared I specifically said "born" because the doomsday argument, as I understand it is concerned with order of birth.
My point was that, even though you expect the same amount of people being born prior and after your birth, that does not actually put an upper limit on how long civilisation is expected to last.
I love the second idea very interesting! Like you said it it wouldn't refute the doomsday argument though since from what I got form the video it doesn't use years but population size as a metric.
Regarding your first point: I believe that is taken into account in the doomsday argument. You could argue that some doomsday scenarios impose a greater threat but you could also make the argument that we have to overcome all of those near doom scenarios just to get to a late doom scenario.
@@niklas5771 Except you're assuming that those "near doom" scenarios are at all likely. In the box example, the 50/50 odds of picking each box skews the odds of getting each ball in the "small" box all the way up to 5%.
But if you were to just take a random ball without the context of the box, suddenly they're all equally likely. Heck, you could make the "large" box happen 99.9% of the time, and suddenly 1-10 would be more likely to have come from the large box!
You must apply this same thinking here: out of all the civilizations that reach our current state, how many become galactic civilizations? We can't possibly know that, as we are the only civilization we've ever seen. Maybe none do, or maybe almost all do. Either way, our current place means that we have a shot at the title. Whether we succeed is to be determined.
This argument completely neglects the fact that humans learn. The longer we survive, the better we get at surviving. That's why life is so special.
that's the same thing I say when I hear people screaming how the world is going to end in 10 years from climate change. Humans are the most adaptable species this planet has ever produced. it is great to look for solutions to big problems, but saying that humanity is going to be extinct from it is absurd.
@@alexvalin9085 I agree completely. Some of my most talented friends have developed a very depressing outlook on the future of humanity. I believe in our ability to do most anything given enough time. And as long as we don't ALL die, we can always just start over.
Nope, it describes exactly that we are more likely to survive the longer we survive. That follows from the premise.
day by day i am seeing how we step closer and closer to destroying eachother and how we slowly but surely become ok with it
I find the overwhelming amount of certainty possible in the two box thought experiment intriguing. For numbers from 11 to 1000 you would have absolute certainty. It's only for numbers 10 and below that uncertainty enters that picture and then only drops to 50%, forcing us now to rely on probability.
Doesn't this assume that "doom late" and "doom soon" have equal probabilities of occurring?
.well no matter what
Each day that passes it gets closer and closer. So sooner rather than later. If you go by that logic. But I personally I prefer it switched.
No, only assumption is that your birth order is typical. So if humanity keeps expanding before the doom, then we should be typical humans and are likely to be in the middle of the order somewhere, and therefore closer to the end than the beginning.
Those are simplifications to better understand the concept. For all we care, you can assume they are defined as any two possible futures that were equally likely before you were born (i.e. before you "picked a ball").
It's funny how one of the best physics shows on TH-cam also happens to be one of the best philosophy shows on TH-cam…
9:28 “I for one welcome our new cybernetic gene-spliced overlords!”
Personally I feel that cybernetic future stuff is making the wrong assumption that humans have stopped evolving, which just isn't the case. Selection of partners is still very much going on and there's plenty of people who never find a mater to have kids with. As long as that is the case + diseases sorting people out, humanity is very much evolving like any other species and there's no need for cybernetics to predict that humans might be very different in the future, depending also on how much our environment will change.
@@LeutnantJoker all the gensplicing+kybernetic ultra human thing, is less about "humas are a done evolving" and more about "k nature you are slow af ... i handle that now". Evolution is a slow random process and humanity isnt to far off to speed the process up tremendously while at the same aim for more specific results. Doesnt mean its a good think, doesnt man its a bad thing, its just a different thing.
He is an adherent of the Genestealer Cult in Warhammer 40K.
@@LeutnantJoker Yeah, no. Even though evolution is still going on, cybernetics will eventually be an extremely useful lifestyle improvement. It's a safe bet to say humans will have more cybernetic parts in the future.
We have 200 years...maybe ...
I came up with this doomsday idea independently of the info from this video and I'm happy to see it discussed by people who know better than I do.
Awe, F it anyways, who lives forever?
Translated into Zen, "Life is an Illusion".
That's not Zen, that's schizophrenia.
@skOsH What does a feeling of dissociation from yourself have to do with philosophy, specifically epistemiology?
Are you saying that Zen Buddhism is all about being ignorant about what is going on behind your back?
Isn't this like saying: "Since it's most likely that a random human is chinese, I must be chinese too."?
No because you need to take into account your reference class.
You are using technology, internet and a certain education level to be able to write English for you to be able to write this post. Therefor you are most likely to be a white person from a first world country.
This is exactly why it's so important to take into account the reference class as you need to take into account the factors that lets you ask the question in the first place.
Entities without the intelligence to ask this (Like animals or simple AI) are not going to ask this question so shouldn't be counted. People that don't have the education to ask this question (children or poor illiterate people) should also not be counted.
If you keep filtering like that you'll eventually only keep first world white person which you most likely are. And again this refined anthropic principle only says what the most likely option will be. There will always be outliers. The chance of that happening is just lower so you should always assume to be the average (while accounting for you being able to ask the question) unless proven otherwise.
@@joey199412 But that's exactly my point, the doomsday argument doesn't consider anything but beeing a cognitive beeing asking that question. It is utterly oversimplified. I can make the almost same argument in favour of beeing part of a species that will conquer the galaxy by changing the argument a bit: namely instead of heaving two bins we now have every possible bin:
i.e. one that has only one idividual until extinction, one that has two and so on up until infinity.
Now If you choose a random individual which is more likely, the individual was part of one of the 200B bins that ends before that, or one of the infinitly many bins that don't.
Say I'm individual #2, am I part of the 9 possible bins that will go extinct before 10 individuals or 200 bins that will be extinct between 800 and 1000 individuals or 20000 bins that will be extinct between 80000-100000 individuals.
You get the idea.
For the evolution argument, Creationists will still only get 6000 years.
I'm a Christian, and an evolutionary biologist, and I am dismayed that so many people equate my faith with these... 'intellectually challenged people's'... 'ideas'. It is a shame that minority which screams loudest seems to make the image of the entire population, at least in some countries.
wasn't that like 500 years ago?
Let's be nice to each other, and we'll all have as much time as we care to have :)
Those are "Young Earth Creationists", not Christians. It's a tiny group that chooses to take literally what even the rest of scripture does not.
Christians are the majority in much of the western world, yet evolution, the 4.5 billion year age of the planet and approximately 14 billion year age of the universe are well accepted. It shouldn't be hard for you to figure out that you're just being bigoted when you assume this stupidity onto an entire group of people.
You must live about 6000 years in the past. The Hovind followers are far and few in between
Everywhere is the center ...
Damn, this episode about doomsday aired just before COVID would pick up steam. Anyway, awesome video.
It seems to me that this doomsday scenario is extremely flawed, is missing so many variables and making baseless assumptions that are heavily biased towards our past. It's a nice thought experiment but is of little to no concrete value.
First off, how can you know the median value of total human beings throughout time, when you don't know when the last human to ever live will be born? If you assume that humans will go on for roughly the same time we have been here, what are you basing this off? After all, human history is a tiny fraction of earth history. We could go extinct in the next 100 years with climate change or AI, in hundreds of millions of years when the sun renders earth inhabitable, in tens of billions of years if we manage to colonize our galaxy, ...etc. How is the doomsday model accounting for any of this?
You can also project this line of reasoning to another time in human history when we were far less and less advanced that our growth rate was lower than it is today, if you apply the same ideas based on their data you could find that humans should already be extinct and only reach 1,000,000 individuals throughout our history.
While making educated assumptions can be useful, when you are making assumptions based on assumptions (which are arbitrarily set for simplicity purposes), what kind of error margins do you get?
You realize this channel is 90% entertainment. The folks here just want to sip coffee and watch space stuff
@@nutmeg0144 90% entertainment? Are you for real?
The flaw is more basic than that. Fact is, we're simply not being randomly selected from a pool of possible people. In any species-wide time-line, all of the currently living people will be forced to exist along that time-line. The "numbered balls from boxes" experiment has the boxes be totally independent from each other. Our past is not independent from our present and future, though. The latter is contingent on the former.
The argument is not fleshed out here and also uses the least conservative assumptions to produce quite an early figure of year 3000, the confidence and assumptions are not shown also. There are indeed wide error bars in these predictions which reflect our lack of surety in the underlying assumptions. A commonly cited prediction: John Leslie's prediction puts doomsday within ~10k years with 95% confidence with assumption of a steady life expectancy of ~80y and world population stabalisation at ~10B.
All the mechanisms you list can be built into the model as priors, if you feel they can be confidently added in. The standard doomsday argument works off flat priors, i.e. it does not bias any hypothetical future over any other. I've seen many criticisms of this argument but most only modify it or change it's predictions without refuting the core message. The real takeaway is not that humanity will die in yr3000 but more that intergalactic civilisation with many-trillion population is very unlikely no matter what priors you chuck into the calculation. The only way around is drastic modification such as ascending to higher forms of life, very dramatic population reduction for very long periods, etc.
To link the the box example in the video: You are the ball that is pulled from the box, the boxes are hypothetical scenarios. In this case with a ball number of 5, it is vastly more likely that the ball originated from the 1-10 box (in fact application of Bayes theorem shows the probability of originating from box one in this case is about 99%- assuming there is a 50-50 chance for each box to be chosen).
You refer to our earlier ancestors but by definition if all humans applied the principle with a 90% confidence, exactly 10% of our earliest ancestors would be incorrect and the remaining 90% would be correct. So with the correct error accounted for you can make a safe bet.
Why i love the anthropic principle. It's one of the few things left i find almost magical. It predicted the cosmological constant, the doomsday argument, and should be taken seriously when talking about boltzmann brains,simulation theory, ect.
I also use this reasoning to find that we are most likely to find ourselves in the most likely universe we should find ourselves in; a cyclic universe, as there are infinitely more chances to find ourselves in a cyclic one as opposed to a one off universe. Coupled with statistics-any chance over infinite time is guaranteed to happen again. Apriori, you know your life is a possibility because you lived it. Therefore, you'll most likely read this again.
I love when 'smart' people make dramatic predictions based on a sample size of 1!
Anyone else come here for Matt O Dowds soothing voice?
I like the idea at the end responding to questions of a "Horn of Gabriel" universe
I doubt every Doomsday predictions, including those done by scientists.
The stars align in the constellation Aquarius next week! We're all dead!
Unless it's about AI. That's one we won't stop without a serious investment in prevention. Prevention no one actually knows how to do yet. Because AI can't just not be made, too many governments and companies are into it. Whelp.
The "AI" doomsayers I take the least seriously.
Pretty sure a good scientist will doubt everything... So much so we question everything; science can't advance with people that think the current theories, hypothesis etc are correct all the time.
Idk mate have you seen this current generation of kids? When they end up running things we are FUCKED
My character's reference class is ranger-magic-user.
Isn't that multi-class limited to half-elves?
Just a question: can’t the Doomsday Argument be used nearly everywhere? For example, let’s use cake- 🍰
Assuming that there are two scenarios, one with the total number of cakes made so far, and another with all the cakes that will ever and have been ever made.
Using the argument implies a more likely chance that the cake I made today would be the last cake ever made, rather than one out all the billions of cakes that will ever be made.
Frankly the fact that it can be used for nearly anything, and will give you the same result makes me discount this immediately.
You are actually using it wrong here. It's far more likely that the cake you've made is at the exact average. So the amount of cakes made in the past and the amount that will be made in the future will be about the same.
In fact specifically it states that your cake being the last one made is almost impossible and it's far more likely that trillions of cakes will come afterwards.
It trends towards everything being as "average" as possible which means being at the exact middle of the total distribution of cakes/people/things that will ever exist in the universe. The more it goes towards the start (first cake/human/thing) or towards the end (last cake/human/thing) the more unlikely it becomes. So the chance that your cake will be the last one is almost 0% chance according to this thing.
You have misinterpreted the usage of it.
@@joey199412 Since the population is rising on an increasing curve there's going to be a cake shortage SOON...
You can't use that argument because there's no observer selection effect on cakes. The reason the anthropic argument is invoked in the context of observers is that the observers are in their own reference class and the actual meaning of probability is tied to that fact. When that observer then goes on to observe a cake, now the observance of the cake is not bayesian evidence for future cakes in the same way to invoke the anthropic argument. Unfortunately I have to say you're just applying it wrong here.
@@joey199412 s/average/median/g
Death is the scariest thing in the universe. I can't imagine not existing and it terrifies me.
The most unsettling thing about this doomsday video is that spider's rain is real.