The Self-Indication Assumption Doomsday argument rebuttal is an objection to the Doomsday argument (that there is only a 5% chance of more than twenty times the historic number of humans ever being born) by arguing that the chance of being born is not one, but is an increasing function of the number of people who will be born.
Read more about Self-Indication Assumption Doomsday Argument Rebuttal: History, The Bayesian Inference of N From n Under The SIA, Significance of Omega, Remarks, SIA Intuition: The Lost-property Metaphor, Problems With The SIA
Famous quotes containing the words assumption, doomsday and/or argument:
“The methodological advice to interpret in a way that optimizes agreement should not be conceived as resting on a charitable assumption about human intelligence that might turn out to be false. If we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and other behaviour of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our standards, we have no reason to count that creature as rational, as having beliefs, or as saying anything.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)
“Even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game of chance, somewhat fixed in the favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably.”
—Truman Capote (1924–1984)
“Our argument ... will result, not upon logic by itself—though without logic we should never have got to this point—but upon the fortunate contingent fact that people who would take this logically possible view, after they had really imagined themselves in the other man’s position, are extremely rare.”
—Richard M. Hare (b. 1919)