Jared Diamond: There’s a 49% Chance the World as We Know It Will End by 2050 | Hacker News Reader

Jared Diamond: There’s a 49% Chance the World as We Know It Will End by 2050

nymag.com

28 pointspseudolus25 comments

I find I have a particular distaste for those who seek to profit from doomsday predictions.

The world as we knew it essentially ended in 1992 with the advent of the internet for the common man. It ended in 1903 with motorized vehicles. For every correct doomsayer there are unfathomably large numbers of people who got it wrong.

The subject of the article might bring up some legitimate issues, but framing it like this isn’t going to help anyone. In the small chance they are right, we will all be in apocalypse anyway, so do you really think that something like this is going to scare people into changing how they live and carry out their daily lives?

To pile on, predictions like this should round to the nearest nice number within the error bars. Saying "49%" implies you have enough knowledge to distinguish between "49%" and "50%" (in this case, there isn't even any quantitative analysis -- it's just a made up number, so they might as well say "49.44232115%" if they're not going to say "50%").

Yeah. Sometimes we use "50/50" as a euphemism when we really have no idea. 49% sounds like "I have no idea but really want everyone to think I've given this a lot of careful thought."

If I had to be charitable, maybe Diamond believes a lone prediction at 50% is actually meaningless, so he always nudges to one side or the other so people can at least score him a little. No idea though.

You’re comparing the invention of a nifty replacement for horses with, for instance, the complete destruction of every city in the United States with a population over 1,000,000 in a global nuclear war.

Thanks, saved me the time that would have been spent saying exactly that.

Welcome to the new century where each distinct generation is so out of touch with the previous the only conclusion they have is utter destruction.

Jared Diamond isn’t talking about problems that can be tied to recent technologies or youthful ideology that can be explained away as one generation not understanding the previous. He is specifically citing 1) the release of carbon dioxide over the past 200 years of mass industrialization 2) the extensive and increasing overuse of resources such as water, topsoil, fisheries which has been increasing unsustainably for hundreds of years 3) the proliferation of nuclear weapons which is again a trend over many decades. I don’t understand how someone can read this interview and conclude “this old fogey doesn’t understand the zoomers!”

Thank goodness for the 51% chance it won't happen. Sorry, I re-calculated. 78.45%. sorry, new data coming in. Its back to 15%, er.. hang on, 98%...

Its a microsoft 'time to complete' bar of risk. It's meaningless, and designed to stop you hitting the [cancel] button.

The world as I knew it has changed and ended pretty much every decade i've been alive so far. The Berlin wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, the internet became a thing(as another commenter mentioned), nafta happened, the world trade center was destroyed and a large portion of the world became embroiled in perpetual war, smartphones became a thing, television and radio pretty much became obsolete. I could probably keep going on about the monumental world shifts that have occured over the last three decades but this list might go on for a while.

> nafta happened

Umm… could you elaborate on how you see NAFTA as having ended the world as you knew it? That seems like an overestimation to me.

I think all of human civilization falling into a new dark age is much more disruptive than 3,000 civilians dying in an act of terrorism.

And he is conjuring this number out of thin air of course. Jared Diamond is a very entertaining writer, but he tends to speculate and make up just-so stories.

Let's see ... I'm 55 now, 31 years from now I'd be 86. Consulting an actuarial life table, 49% is personally pretty close to right.

This is a magnificently unfalsifiable prediction.

We constantly have to make unfalsifiable predictions to make decisions in this world. You can’t turn back the clock and see how a different decision would have effected the outcome of your life. The best we can do is use our prior knowledge of the way the world works. Since Jared Diamond has researched human history, society collapse, resource management, etc, he seems better equipped to make these estimations than most.

It's one thing to say "I think there's a high chance the world will end, for these reasons." It's another to quantify it to two-digit precision.

I agree. I was just disagreeing with the idea that we shouldn’t make informed predictions because they can’t be tested.

Just wait.

Even if the world doesn't end, you can't calculate the true chance it would have after the fact. Flipping one coin a single time doesn't tell you what the heads/tails probabilities are.

The 2040 movie presents a positive vision of what the future could look like:

https://www.madmanfilms.com.au/2040film/

There is literally a 100% chance the world, AS YOU KNOW IT will end by the time you go to bed tonight.

Would you want it any other way?

Now why won't I be rushing to read his next book?

Great title for clicks, but meaningless precision.

Thank God it's not 50.

My calculations show that the chance is more like 47-48%.

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