Thanks for mentioning this; it indeed wasnât in the database, and Iâve now added it.
Though I felt a bit hesitant about doing so, and havenât filled in the âWhat is their estimate?â column; I left this just as a quote.
We could interpret Tiper as saying âI now think thereâs a greater than 50% chance humans will be wiped out this centuryâ. But when people just say things like âI think X will happenâ or âI think X wonât happenâ, I donât feel super confident that they really meant âgreater than 50%â or âless than 50%â. For example, it seems plausible they just mean something like âI think we should pay [or less] more attention to the chance of Xâ.
Also, when people donât give quantitative estimates, I feel a little less confident that theyâve thought for more than a few seconds about (a) precisely what theyâre 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 donât feel super confident people have thought about (a) and (b) when they give quantitative predictions either, and indeed itâs unclear what many predictions in the database are really about, and many of the predictors explicitly say things like âbut this is quite a made up number and Iâd probably say something different if you asked me again tomorrowâ. 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 wasnât in the database, and Iâve now added it.
Though I felt a bit hesitant about doing so, and havenât filled in the âWhat is their estimate?â column; I left this just as a quote.
We could interpret Tiper as saying âI now think thereâs a greater than 50% chance humans will be wiped out this centuryâ. But when people just say things like âI think X will happenâ or âI think X wonât happenâ, I donât feel super confident that they really meant âgreater than 50%â or âless than 50%â. For example, it seems plausible they just mean something like âI think we should pay [or less] more attention to the chance of Xâ.
Also, when people donât give quantitative estimates, I feel a little less confident that theyâve thought for more than a few seconds about (a) precisely what theyâre 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 donât feel super confident people have thought about (a) and (b) when they give quantitative predictions either, and indeed itâs unclear what many predictions in the database are really about, and many of the predictors explicitly say things like âbut this is quite a made up number and Iâd probably say something different if you asked me again tomorrowâ. 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.)