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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (67753)	4/20/2018 2:03:53 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 364937

I don't need a PhD in chemistry to know that a chemist (as a chemist) wouldn't be able to figure out what movie will win the Oscar for best picture next year (he could guess, maybe even he knows a lot about movies and voting paterns of the academy and its an educated guess, but its still not chemistry), or that an Historian wouldn't be the person to do brain surgery. Its just not a matter of statistics. You can feed in certain assumptions and then based on those assumptions and other data do a statistical analysis that makes a prediction, but the assumptions themselves are not solidly established as true (or even extremely statistically likely) by statistics or really anything else. They may be relying on the same type of analysis used in the Doomsday argument about how long humanity has left. en.wikipedia.org Look at all humans that exist, have existed or will ever exist. Put that together as a set. If you look at some particular human they probably won't near the beginning or end of mankind, more likely somewhere in the middle. If you assume that you can run an analysis to give a probability that humankind will last past some X number of years. That was done and it gave a 95% chance of human extinction within 9,120 years. A problem with that is if you do run such an analysis anywhere well away from the beginning of humanity (either towards its end or towards its beginning) it will give you false results. The analysis itself is solid enough and only gives about a 5% chance of humanity lasting past that point, but the assumed conditions can not be solidly established to that same level of confidence.