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Comment by kordless | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

>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?

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

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

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?

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?

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.

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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