“Personally, I now think we humans will be wiped out this century,” Frank Tipler told me. He may be the most pessimistic of Bayesian doomsayers, followed by Willard Wells (who gives the same time frame for the end of civilization and the beginning of the postapocalypse).
Thanks for mentioning this; it indeed wasn’t in the database, and I’ve now added it.
Though I felt a bit hesitant about doing so, and haven’t filled in the “What is their estimate?” column; I left this just as a quote.
We could interpret Tiper as saying “I now think there’s a greater than 50% chance humans will be wiped out this century”. But when people just say things like “I think X will happen” or “I think X won’t happen”, I don’t feel super confident that they really meant “greater than 50%” or “less than 50%”. For example, it seems plausible they just mean something like “I think we should pay [or less] more attention to the chance of X”.
Also, when people don’t give quantitative estimates, I feel a little less confident that they’ve thought for more than a few seconds about (a) precisely what they’re 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 don’t feel super confident people have thought about (a) and (b) when they give quantitative predictions either, and indeed it’s unclear what many predictions in the database are really about, and many of the predictors explicitly say things like “but this is quite a made up number and I’d probably say something different if you asked me again tomorrow”. But I feel like people might tend to take their statements even less seriously when those statements remain fully qualitative.
Not in your database, I think:
William Poundstone, The Doomsday Calculation, p. 259
Thanks for mentioning this; it indeed wasn’t in the database, and I’ve now added it.
Though I felt a bit hesitant about doing so, and haven’t filled in the “What is their estimate?” column; I left this just as a quote.
We could interpret Tiper as saying “I now think there’s a greater than 50% chance humans will be wiped out this century”. But when people just say things like “I think X will happen” or “I think X won’t happen”, I don’t feel super confident that they really meant “greater than 50%” or “less than 50%”. For example, it seems plausible they just mean something like “I think we should pay [or less] more attention to the chance of X”.
Also, when people don’t give quantitative estimates, I feel a little less confident that they’ve thought for more than a few seconds about (a) precisely what they’re 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 don’t feel super confident people have thought about (a) and (b) when they give quantitative predictions either, and indeed it’s unclear what many predictions in the database are really about, and many of the predictors explicitly say things like “but this is quite a made up number and I’d probably say something different if you asked me again tomorrow”. 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.)