Thanks for mentioning this; it indeed wasnāt in the database, and Iāve now added it.
Though I felt a bit hesitant about doing so, and havenāt filled in the āWhat is their estimate?ā column; I left this just as a quote.
We could interpret Tiper as saying āI now think thereās a greater than 50% chance humans will be wiped out this centuryā. But when people just say things like āI think X will happenā or āI think X wonāt happenā, I donāt feel super confident that they really meant āgreater than 50%ā or āless than 50%ā. For example, it seems plausible they just mean something like āI think we should pay [or less] more attention to the chance of Xā.
Also, when people donāt give quantitative estimates, I feel a little less confident that theyāve thought for more than a few seconds about (a) precisely what theyāre predicting (e.g., does Tipler really mean extinction, or just the end of civilization as we know it?), and (b) how likely they really think the thing is. I donāt feel super confident people have thought about (a) and (b) when they give quantitative predictions either, and indeed itās unclear what many predictions in the database are really about, and many of the predictors explicitly say things like ābut this is quite a made up number and Iād probably say something different if you asked me again tomorrowā. But I feel like people might tend to take their statements even less seriously when those statements remain fully qualitative.
Thanks for mentioning this; it indeed wasnāt in the database, and Iāve now added it.
Though I felt a bit hesitant about doing so, and havenāt filled in the āWhat is their estimate?ā column; I left this just as a quote.
We could interpret Tiper as saying āI now think thereās a greater than 50% chance humans will be wiped out this centuryā. But when people just say things like āI think X will happenā or āI think X wonāt happenā, I donāt feel super confident that they really meant āgreater than 50%ā or āless than 50%ā. For example, it seems plausible they just mean something like āI think we should pay [or less] more attention to the chance of Xā.
Also, when people donāt give quantitative estimates, I feel a little less confident that theyāve thought for more than a few seconds about (a) precisely what theyāre predicting (e.g., does Tipler really mean extinction, or just the end of civilization as we know it?), and (b) how likely they really think the thing is. I donāt feel super confident people have thought about (a) and (b) when they give quantitative predictions either, and indeed itās unclear what many predictions in the database are really about, and many of the predictors explicitly say things like ābut this is quite a made up number and Iād probably say something different if you asked me again tomorrowā. But I feel like people might tend to take their statements even less seriously when those statements remain fully qualitative.
(I could be wrong about all of that, though.)