The Meta-LW Doomsday Argument
N/A
The Meta-LessWrong Doomsday Argument (MLWDA) predicts long AI timelines and that we can relax:
LessWrong was founded in 200917ya (16 years ago), and there have been 44 mentions of the ‘Doomsday argument’ prior to this one, and it is now 2025; so there have been 2.75 mentions of the Doomsday Argument per year on average.
By the Doomsday argument, we would then medianly-expect mentions to stop in: after 44 additional mentions over 16 additional years, ie. 2041. (And our 95% CI on that 44 would then be +1 mention to +1,716 mentions, corresponding to late-2025 AD to 2649 AD.)
By a curious coincidence, double-checking to see if really no one had made a meta-DA before, it turns out that Alexey Turchin has made a meta-DA as well about 7 years ago, calculating that.
If we assume 199333ya as the beginning of a large DA-Doomers reference class, and it is 2018 now (at the moment of writing this text), the age of the DA-Doomers class is 25 years.
Then, with 50% probability, the reference class of DA-Doomers will disappear in 2043, according to Gott’s equation!
Interestingly, the dates around 2030–202050 appear in many different predictions of the Singularity or the end of the world (2018; 2018b; 2006).
His estimate of 2043 is surprisingly close to 2041.
We offer no explanation as to why this numerical consilience of meta-DA calculations has happened; we attribute their success, as all else, to divine benevolence.
Regrettably, the 2041–2043 date range would seem to imply that it is unlikely we will obtain enough samples of the MLWDA in order to compute a Meta-Meta-LessWrong Doomsday Argument (MMLWDA) with non-vacuous confidence intervals, inasmuch as every mention of the MLWDA would be expected to contain a mention of the DA as well.
Note that responses to this post which attempt to make the first MMLWDA are invalid because they are clearly not randomly sampled in time: they occupy a unique, privileged point as the first response, triggered by it. The first valid use of MMLWDA has to wait for a plausibly random reason to make it.
Turchin actually notes this issue in his paper, in the context of, of course, the DA and why the inventor Brandon Carter could not make a Meta-DA (but he and I could):
The problem is that if I think that I am randomly chosen from all DA-Doomers, we get very strong version of DA, as ‘DA-Doomers’ appeared only recently and thus the end should be very soon, in just a few decades from now. The first member of the DA-Doomers reference class was Carter, in 197353ya, joined by just a few of his friends in the 1980s. (It was rumored that Carter recognized the importance of DA-doomers class and understood that he was first member of it—and thus felt that this “puts” world in danger, as if he was the first in the class, the class is likely to be very short. Anyway, his position was not actually random as he was the first discoverer of the DA).
(One could attempt to make a MMLWDA-like prediction using knowledge of the world, but this is not a MMLWDA per se.)
Robo notes that
I’ve thought about the Doomsday argument more than daily for the past 15 years, enough for me to go from “Why am I improbably young?” to “Oh, I guess I’m just a person who thinks about the doomsday argument a lot.”
Fun “fact”: when a person thinks about the Doomsday argument, they have a decent change of being me.
This raises the alarming possibility that, inasmuch as both the author and reader of this document are thinking about the Doomsday argument, despite whatever personal evidence they may think they have for that belief, they may be mistaken about their identity, and actually be Robo. As it is a very bad thing to be mistaken about your identity, it may be a good idea to schedule future random calendar reminders to record whether one is thinking about the DA that day or not; if you are, you have gained additional evidence you are Robo. (It is also possible that one is in fact a future scholar of LessWrong and/or the Doomsday Argument.)
After enough such date-checks, if you have been thinking about the DA an unusually large percentage of the time, it is advisable to see a psychiatrist.