If any past apocalyptic prediction had been true, you would not have been around to write this sentence and we would not have been around to read it. It’s not a very convincing argument when we cannot in principle observe the counterfactual.
Any other argument against <ridiculous apocalyptic supposition> is perfectly fine, just not the "it hasn't happened before" one.
In that quote, the author is telling you that all of your past predictions of teapots have been wrong (which is 100% true -- the ridiculous doom has been going on since at least GPT-2. remember how that was "too dangerous to release"?) Show me why I should believe in this one.
> In that quote, the author is telling you that all of your past predictions of teapots have been wrong
Past predictions have zero influence on future ones. If you flip a coin 10 times and get heads every time, the probability of your next coin flip coming up heads is 50%, not 100%, because it is independent of any prior trials.
Moreover, if Alice and Bob each make 100 predictions and are 100% wrong, but Charles makes 10 predictions and is 100% correct, Alice and Bob's predictions have zero bearing on whether you should trust Charles' predictions. They are not even a factor to be considered.
I don't think I even disagree with you in the broad picture. I am not concerned about language models. But you have committed three blatant logical fallacies in a row. You literally could not make a worse case for your position if you tried, I suspect.
The philosophical burden of proof lies on the person making empirically unfalsifiable claims. That is the point of Russell's Teapot.
You appear not to understand what a prediction is. "I believe X will likely happen because Y" is different from an assertion of fact that "X will happen". A prediction cannot even be empirically proved! You are simply suggesting that nobody is allowed to make a prediction, ever. Russell's Teapot, too, is not an argument that you cannot believe in God. It is an argument that the unfalsifiability of a claim is not a basis to assert that God exists.
(I refer to it that way rather than a "variant" because Quantum Immortality should always be parameterized by an acceptance function... for any given acceptance function, that function will be preserved in the quantum multiverse, and scoping the precision of the function affects the percentage of universes that retain it rather than whether it will be retained. There's actually nothing in that definition that requires that the acceptance function describe a "conscious system", you can stick something that accepts a "civilization" in there just as easily. Or "this rock over here". Or any other thing you like. Conscious systems are just a particularly interesting case to us conscious systems.)
It's not a vacuous argument, though it is a funky one with very odd characteristics. But if you accept the suppositions underneath it, it does follow and is not vacuous. The suppositions are certainly not completely obviously true on their own terms, though.
I never really understood what is the explanation for ... old people that we notice as dying. In today's times you might have an argument that some kind of life extension could pop up and some of the people alive today could have that as an excuse.
But like 100 years ago? How would people dying of old age "continue living"?
This is also where it is important to understand the argument is parameterized. If your acceptance function is "a full human body living a full human life in the way I'm used to", then you're asking for a huge whackload of improbability to keep that body alive. If, on the other hand, you merely ask for "the minimum system that stays conscious", while that is still a huge whackload it is exponentially smaller, by a very substantial factor.
Anyone who takes any sort of comfort in the argument doesn't understand it. It preserves minimal consciousness, for any and all definitions of "minimal consciousness". It does also preserve bodies, but at an exponentially smaller probability. You can even use as your acceptance function "civilization exactly as we know it today, with everyone currently living still alive in 1000 years" and that comes at a yet smaller exponential probability. All of these "exponential probabilities" as separated by numbers of zeros that themselves require exponential notation to write. But the universe itself is making so many splits and branches all the time that it has the "budget" for these probabilities to be true, somewhere in the quantum multiverse.
Or, put another way, any event that you can draw a non-zero probability pathway for occurs. It is not impossible for me to spontaneously have my particular genetic defect reversed in every cell in my body, so there are branches where that happens... they're just exponentially unlikely compared to what we actually experience. It can literally be in %10^(-10^1,000,000,000) of the universes... but if it's not zero, it will happen, if the quantum multiverse is the correct view.
But yes, the apparent loss of information seems to be true, for us at this technological level.
It could even be us, future us, being able to somehow recover past data and literally reassemble all of the humans that ever lived. They aren't as many as you'd think, in the grand scheme of things.
Everyone should very much hope that quantum immortality is false. It is the very opposite of comforting.
Moreover, if the theory is true, it is happening all around us, all the time. Every consciousness that has ever existed, human or otherwise, is still in existence in some branch of the multiverse.
It's a pretty horrifying theory.
And people seem to be captivated by these memes, because the fear is great. It similar to eternal damnation in hell meme. Just look for how long it worked, and it's still working. The logic is simple, it's too dangerous to ignore such a threat, even with seemingly very small probabilities. But that still doesn't make it possible.
Logical traps founded on wrong assumptions.
That is not the argument being made. That is the straw man version you are presenting. Read the full paragraph, and the one after, and it's obvious:
> There are myriad policy responses. Whatever we do, those responses will require popular consent and careful deliberation. No one person, or one company, or one movement, knows the answer and history is no guide, save that apocalyptic predictions about new technologies have, to date, all been wrong.
> History does provide a great deal of guidance, however, about the use and misuse of government power. It tells us that the state is in fact likely the worst possible custodian for the most powerful publication and data analysis technologies.
Emphasis mine.
“History is a guide to state abuses of power in many ways, and most of them point in the same direction, that it is a very bad idea to invest powers like these with the state”
These are two separate arguments. I am sympathetic to the latter and endorse it essentially as written, which is why I didn’t criticise it. My criticism of the former is not a metonymic dismissal of every other argument in the piece.
Only one "apocalyptic prediction" needs to be true, once, for everyone to have a bad day. The fact that previous ones were avoid may be survivor ship bias and perhaps:
> The preparedness paradox is the proposition that if a society or individual acts effectively to mitigate a potential disaster such as a pandemic, natural disaster or other catastrophe so that it causes less harm, the avoided danger will be perceived as having been much less serious because of the limited damage actually caused. The paradox is the incorrect perception that there had been no need for careful preparation as there was little harm, although in reality the limitation of the harm was due to preparation. Several cognitive biases can consequently hamper proper preparation for future risks.[1]
I don't think there are many truly human created apocalyptic events out there besides global thermonuclear war, and I don't think the worst-case AI superintelligent killer robot scenario would be apocalyptic. Unless it somehow triggers global thermonuclear war, but then it becomes a chicken-or-egg question (and it'll probably be humans pushing the proverbial button, as nukes are '60s tech and (hopefully) airgapped etc).
It is not like history was composed of happiness and roses only. Some of the really really bad stuff happened within last 100 years and a lot of that bad stuff was enabled and made possible by technology.
Like it's fine to say this but the worst exterminations of human beings weren't enabled by anything much kre sophisticated then the pointy stick, or at most, the railroad.
We're just starting. The air conditioning technology didn't hit its wall of fire yet. What we're going to do when that tech will cease to cool us?
Every AC system (from refrigerators to air conditioners) has an upper limit, which is around 41 degrees Celsius for T1 class.
More: https://angliancompressors.com/blog/how-ambient-temperature-...
There's a T3 class for up to 52 degrees Celsius. While it's higher than 41 degrees, it's not significantly higher:
https://zerohvacr.com/blogs/t1-t2-t3-explained-climate-class...
For T1 class of devices, that 41 degrees is also a physical limit, not an artificial cut, because of their design.
You know, thermodynamics.
Move. This is already happening, with water shortages forcing people to move. Climate change will (likely) cause famines and many deaths, but the bigger effect will be mass migration.
Another planet? How?
We assume that we will have a planet to live at the end of the day. I'm not so sure about it for the long run.
> Such as?
The ozone layer, Y2K. More recently, climate change (which humanity as a whole is mostly doing nothing about, so we'll see how that ends).
Good luck hitting a Mach 15 missile with a trebuchet.
>If any past apocalyptic prediction had been true, you would not have been around to write this sentence and we would not have been around to read it
So what? How is this [proportion of possible universes in which we can read the failed prediction] logically relevant to our universe?
It just doesn't click for me, it smells like some additional premise is smuggled, possibly the same as in the simulation hypothesis argument.
A statement can be a trivial tautology, as in “P or not-P”. Or it can be a more complicated form of tautology, such as a “self-referential” tautology, as in “This statement is true”. The anthropic principle is then just a name for the claim that there is also another complicated form of tautology alongside “self-referential”, one that we might call “indexical”.