From: Bryan Moss (bryan.moss@dial.pipex.com)
Date: Fri Aug 28 1998 - 14:36:25 MDT
Nick Bostrom wrote:
> > If the Argument is true then, by the very
> > nature of it, there isn't squat we can do.
>
> That's not true. Even under the interpretation
> that doom will strike soon (just one among
> several other interpretations), we can reduce
> the risk of doom by reducing the various
> empirical threats - black goo, meteor impact,
> high-energy physics experiment, nuclear or germ
> warfare, environmental collaps, etc. This will
> affect the empirical priors that we feed into
> Bayes' theorem and hence the posterior
> probabilities that come out.
If you rephrased the argument as a change in state
(observer to corpse, for instance) then you just
might be able to calculate the necessary change
for a species *not* to go extinct.
Just a thought, don't ask me how to do it...
BM
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