Doomsday Clock Moves Closer to Midnight | Hacker News Reader

Doomsday Clock Moves Closer to Midnight

nytimes.com

73 pointsdnetesn65 comments

I've taken vague note of the Doomsday Clock for a long time -- and it's a clever concept without a coherent calibration mechanism.

No quarrel with their directional moves ... now or at any other time. But they've ended up in the incongruous situation of saying that 2017 at this very moment is already more risky than the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, or Barry Goldwater's mutterings about nuclear options in Vietnam in 1964, or the China-Russia border war of 1969.

No. Simply no. They missed the chance in the early 1990s to move the clock back to about 3 p.m., giving themselves much more room to create carefully graduated increments of alarm as fresh stresses arose. The current state of play in the USA deserves much more than a 30-second adjustment, and somewhat less than a declaration that it's 2 1/2 minutes before midnight. I can think of at least a dozen ways things could get worse before we're at imminent risk of breathing radioactive isotopes for the (annoyingly short) rest of our lives. Some of those perils already popped up in the 1950s/1960s, and we made our way through them.

The current clock settings hardly do justice to the scientific method, or the rightful role of subject experts in public debate.

Perhaps the clock sits on a train of which the current velocity of our situation relative to the speed of light has increased when compared to the speed of the "good ol` days" train. Thus, 30 seconds perceived at our current speed while on this train would be perceived as a much longer time if viewed from the other train. Perhaps our situation will continue to gain velocity to a point which great increases in danger to human kind is perceived to be only a fraction of a second, until the point at which we reach the speed of light, our matter becomes energy and we have no need for clocks anymore.

moving some imaginary clock back and forth to give/relieve oneself anxiety always struck me as kinda weird.

Don't people have anything else to do?

The concept of how close humanity is to global catastrophe is difficult to convey directly, yet it's useful to be able to do so. The Doomsday Clock is one easy way.

Large, complex systems are by there very nature difficult to understand. Being able to summarize them easily — even if they don't completely capture the nuance — allows people to get an idea of what's going on. It's not much different from using KPIs and other metrics to understand a business.

You can argue that the metrics aren't useful, but providing reasons why you think so, and possibly suggest better ways would help justify your claim.

The problem is that they don't have a clear method of calculation and a clear meaning of what a minute means.

For example, let's made up some criteria:

1 minute = 99% probability of human extinction in 10 years

2 minutes = 98% probability of human extinction in 10 years

3 minutes = 97% probability of human extinction in 10 years

I'm not sure what 2 hours means. Probably the scale should not be more complex than (100-p) * min/%

Or perhaps it's better to define 1 minute = 90% probability of human extinction in 100 years

Or 1 minute = 50% probability of human extinction in 1 year

It's not clear what 1 minute before doomsday officially means.

Moreover, let's say that they define that 1 minute is x% chance of humanity destruction in y years. How are they calculating it? Do they have any model? How did they calibrate the model? How did they test the model? Is it reliable?

It's a made up number, without any scientific base. It's only an opinion of a bunch of people that happened to work as scientific, not a scientific measurement.

I think you've made a lot of valid points. It's a pretty complex system they're trying to quantify.

You have to start somewhere, and having a group of people who specifically decide to take into account what they consider useful criteria and deliberate about it is a step forward. I think it's clear it could be better if it were more rigorous. It wouldn't surprise me if there are people out there working to do just that. It's not useless just because it's attempting to quantify a complex system in a more subjective manner when it's not clear better alternatives are available. You're right that it's an opinion of scientists, and not a scientific measurement. They're experts in their fields and their opinion does mean something. You're free to weight that how you want, of course.

It blurs the line between science and bullshit. For example in

  Scientifics say the Doomsday clock is 2:30 minutes before Midnight

  Scientifics say this wall painting is 40.000 years old

Which one is reliable? Which one should a young Earth creationist believe? Are 40.000 years real years or some kind of metaphor? Is that number reliable?

They should each be interpreted in the context they're intended. What does it mean to describe a particular pain to be a 6 on a scale of 1 to 10? Or the numerical values on the Likert scale to measure opinion? Do these similarly blur the line between science and bullshit? The question "are we closer or further from global catastrophe?" is one worth trying to answer. The Doomsday Clock is one way to make this comparison. Indeed, the Doomsday Clock value is much more like pain or Likert scales in that it's used for comparison, as opposed to an absolute value.

I'm not sure what you're arguing so strongly against. I'm not saying the Doomsday Clock is perfect. I think it's useful. It can likely be improved. When/if we can find better quantitative representation for this, I agree we should use it.

Come on—trying to determining the risk of a nuclear war or any global catastrophe and communicating that risk to the public seems pretty important to me.

Don't fixate on the "imaginary clock" aspect, it's just a representation.

Who said that the scale was linear?

The normal clock they based it on did.

Otherwise they should have used something more appropriate to make their point.

Clocks by Zeno -- helping atomic scientists on their journey for the past 111.1111 meters.

the rightful role of subject experts in public debate

You mean the people the administration is overtly sidelining in favor of their 'alternative facts' on a wide gamut of subjects?

Advancing it by 30 seconds seems very similar to a parent who has made some threat that they never intended to carry through, counting 1, 2, 2-and-a-half, 2-and-three-quarters...

If you have such a long established tradition of using "minutes" as some kind of metaphor for upcoming doom, it doesn't feel meaningful to suddenly start talking about half-minutes.

> a parent who has made some threat that they never intended to carry through, counting 1, 2, 2-and-a-half, 2-and-three-quarters...

As a parent, I've taken this through as far as 2 and 255/256. (Although by that point it had changed from a threat to a math lesson.)

Is that what finally got them to behave? "Noooooooo!!!! Anything but math!!!"

IIRC, the Doomsday Clock was about nuclear war. If we're including "climate change", what other things should we include?

>represented an analogy for the threat of global nuclear war; however, since 2007 it has also reflected climate change,[4] and new developments in the life sciences and technology that could inflict irrevocable harm to humanity.[5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock

It has been this way for nearly a decade. It's also plausible that they are linked - climate change destroying natural resources (land, food, etc.) certainly has the potential to inflict political instability and conflict.

The doomsday clock always strikes me more as a doomsday gauge ;)

I mean, once the clock reaches zero, we are all dead. But nuclear bombs don't fall because the clock reached zero - it's the other way around.

This strikes me as more of a statement than an assessment.

The clock is now closer to apocalyptic midnight, than at any time during the lifetime of vast majority of readers here, myself included. It is worse than during both the Caribbean crisis and early 80th.

Which, given some of the close calls in the early 80s and the Cuban Missile Crisis, illustrates how absurd this whole thing has become.

The clock isn't updated instantly.

The closest nuclear war threat, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, reached crisis, climax, and resolution before the Clock could be set to reflect that possible doomsday.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock#Symbolic_timepi...

Latest, completely relevant Hardcore History just released yesterday.

http://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-59-the-destroyer-o...

Certainly worth a listen.

"On Thursday, the group of scientists who orchestrate the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic instrument informing the public when the earth is facing imminent disaster, moved its minute hand to two and a half minutes before the final hour."

1984's Iron Maiden - 2 minutes to midnight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qbRHY1l0vc

I never really understood the meaning behind the lyrics until now.

It's less than the expected change of 1 minute. That's... better, right?

When you're at 3 minutes, you can only subtract a full minute so many times without the clock becoming irrelevant.

Oh great, now they'll do a leap second calibration and end the world.

I feel like we've all witnessed so much madness the past few years that we've become desensitized. Nothing shocks us any longer. This is worrying because it allows for gradual escalation until the inevitable.

(I think this is true regardless of political orientation.)

propaganda

This clock seems rather opinionated. What happens at midnight? Or better... what if nothing happens? And how would this work anyway... some country launches the first nuke, and someone goes running to update the clock to midnight?

It's disingenuous to call this a "clock", given clocks keep their own time through a rigorous standard of counting the passage of precisely measured causality. While we may be "closer" to doom by some arbitrary consensus mechanism, only humans can choose the causality of enabling that final "doom" event, or putting it off for another day. Or, put another way, it ain't over till it's over.

The Doomsday Clock is a symbolic clock face that represents a countdown to possible global catastrophe. It has been maintained since 1947 by the members of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Science and Security Board, who are in turn advised by the Governing Board and the Board of Sponsors, including 18 Nobel Laureates. The closer they set the Clock to midnight, the more vulnerable the scientists believe the world is to global disaster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock

These are sharp people. They're fully aware it's not a clock in the strict sense you're pedantically ascribing. It's a useful analogy.

Analogies are comparisons of two things, usually for clarification. A clock uses comparative based mechanics to keep time. On the other hand, these scientists are claiming their opinion is a "factual" event that can be compared to a "clock". I'm pointing out that someone is using mixed messaging to try to tell the future when the future hasn't happened yet. The last thing we need right now is for a bunch of people who "speak for science" trying to say that it's a fact we're closer to blowing ourselves up. It's a fact we haven't blown ourselves up yet and an opinion that it stays that way.

Is the state of the world a fact? I'd argue it is. Are some states of the world have greater likelihood of global catastrophe than others? Likewise, I'd argue there are. Trying to determine whether that likelihood is greater or lesser compared to other times is useful, though it might not be easy (or even possible) to measure it quantitatively with arbitrary precision. In that sense the Doomsday Clock represents an opinion as opposed to a absolute numerical value.

Some opinions are more valid than others. I think it's reasonable to weight the opinion of the The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Science and Security Board heavier than the average person, and I also think its something reasonable people can disagree about.

There's nothing "sharp" about these people. If they were sharp they'd be spending their free time solving hard problems (which include cancer, aids, Alzheimer's) rather than maintaining an imaginary clock. Absolute nonsense, these "scientist" should be ashamed of themselves and in my mind they've already lost all credibility.

A glance at the board's membership suggests the clock is a side project. Their daytime pursuits include nuclear research, environmental policy, public health preparedness against bio-attacks, climatology, and quantum physics. http://thebulletin.org/science-and-security-board

Part of a scientist's job is communicating results to non-scientists.

So they are not scientists? They haven't done anything to solve the worlds problems? I take it you are in a position to judge, since you seem to be handing out judgement even more freely than they are?

>they'd be spending their free time solving hard problems.

Well, this update in the clock can't take a significant amount of time.

With a board empaneled to decide? Are you sure about that?

So if you were smart, you'd be spending time solving hard problems instead of wasting time chatting to people on HN, yes? Well no, you're able to maintain a social life and hold political views and so on in parallel to your professional activities. Why wouldn't you think the same to be true of these scientists?

Yeah, something the military's Defcon scale seems more appropriate, if anything.

Doomsday vector clock.

it's a metaphor

The use of a "doomsday clock" as a measurement seems like such an anachronism that it's almost adorable.

Why? The threat of global nuclear annihilation didn't disappear with the USSR.

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