In this shitty bathroom analysis we examine Doomsday Probability (USA/Russia/et al) using our Proprietary Decisioning System [smoov.bra.in2023] to test our hypothesis.
INTRO TO THE END đź“Š
There has been a rumor going around this week that the US and Russia are on the brink of thermonuclear war.
Something about a power plant in Ukraine, some explosives, high tensions, and possibly a false flag.
They say it could lead to nuclear war, armageddon, total global annihilation.
Or possibly another long-boring white paper on Game Theory and subgame perfection.
For the sake of being boring, however, let us consider, is there a Nash Equilibrium in total global annihilation?
In an obscurantist world with imperfect information, where not all actors are rational, where rational actors can have lapses in judgment, and where tension and emotion can reach apogee, it can be incredibly difficult to evaluate risks and predict outcomes properly/effectively.
Humans are interesting creatures.
Their behaviors aren’t random.
They’re systematic and predictable – making the species predictably irrational.
This may destabilize the system away from its Nash equilibrium.
But I digress.
While I am not sure what is really going on at that power plant thousands of miles away (or if nuclear annihilation is right around the corner), the situation reminds me of one of the most interesting phenomena demonstrated by our species that has existed since our ancestors first walked the planet…
A phenomenon that I like to call our “Doomsday Time Series”.
Our species seems to have an ever-present fascination with doom.
Your Twitter timeline today is a good example of this behavior.
Nuclear war is trending, World War III is trending, etcetera, etcetera…
This is normal.
Every human, seemingly, from the day they are born (until the day they die) will constantly hear about all the various things that will eventually “destroy” civilization.
Wars, famines, pestilences, earthquakes, etcetera, etcetera…
On land, in air, and by sea.
The end is nigh, sayeth them all.
From the ancients who first looked up at the sky thousands of years ago, to the Romans in the 1st millennium… magnificent, unexplained cosmic events and final end-time battles marked the times.
In our current place in the timeline, we have followed a similar (albeit more refined) model.
It was Haley’s comet (the evil eye in the sky) in 1910, the various raptures and world implosions of the 30’s, and then the world wars and post-war apocalypses of the 40s. New apocalypses and world swallowing events all through the 50s and 60s, armageddons and second comings through the 70s and 80s. Then more tribulations, raptures, new messiahs, spiritual overlords throughout the 90s.
Then after a time, the prophecies became more technical; y2k, hadron, planetary alignments, shifting poles, the 2012 phenomenon, mayan calendar, nibiru, overpopulation, global warming, nuclear annihilation, AI, alien invasion, supernovas, gamma rays, red suns, the heat death of the universe…
It goes on and on.
Civilization (so far), however, has resisted the combined attacks of these prophesized calamities wonderfully well.
For still, at the time of this writing, in 2023, humankind still stands.
Which, in turn, begs the question, why were the ancestors so very wrong?
Prodigious errors in reasoning, perhaps?
The kind only a doctrinaire can make.
For it seems that every human ancestor who has made such prediction has had a proclivity for being incorrect.
Artist depiction of Armageddon, End of Times Battle
Why, then – if there is a 99.999999999% probability that you will be wrong, even bother to play the fool?
I do not have a good answer, or any answer at all for that matter, as to why everyone willingly plays a game that is fundamentally unwinnable, or why everyone who has tried has been so spectacularly wrong…
I am simply the dumb ancient ancestor (who will be wrong) in my prediction, to another human who will be asking/pondering this very question likely a millennia from now, who very likely, will also be wrong.
But if I were to use my erudition, practicality, and unrefreshing honesty to take a random shot in the dark, I would estimate, in my most humble opinion, that failed doomsday prophets and their predictions appear, in the simplest of terms, to be a function of spacetime (e.g., I am consciously alive now and therefore doom is near and can and must only happen in my lifetime).
or,
“Time is consciousness, and I am alive and experiencing this now, and things are very serious and more important than ever in the spacetime that I am experiencing them, because consciousness has alerted me to this fact, and the end will be bad because ends are bad, and I will eventually end, and I must stop it.”
Every civilization since the beginning of time has had an appetite for doom and has engaged in such failed predictions and flawed reasonings.
“This is it. This is the time. The signs are all aligned. Prepare for the end.”
Our generation is not the first, and we will not be the last.
By my observations, this behavior appears to be a feature, not a bug, as our species is famous for notoriously failed doomsday predictions and false starts over the end of the world, each doled out with the utmost confidence, uttered with absolute certainty, and filled with “undeniable proof” that the end is fast approaching.
Boldly going where nearly everyone has gone before – straight to the wrong answer.
Generation after generation after generation…
Paradoxically, as the volume of failed predictions grows on our axis of doom, human cynicism also appears to grow at the same rate, perfectly correlated.
The more failed predictions, the higher human cynicism appears to increase, making us more vulnerable to ruin, if/when ruin were to ever happen.
A function of Brandolini’s Law perchance?
Something to ponder.
But, of course, there is always the wise guy counterargument that “in the present, we have the best possible tools, so now is the best time to predict the future most accurately.”
And I would imagine you could counterargue that counterargument by arguing that, theoretically, we are in an infinite continuum of perpetual “nows” so, technically, this framework should hold true AND be equally as fallible throughout near every moment in time.
Every ancestor has had the same ability to make such calculation.
But, for argument’s sake, let us consider the possibility.
With supercomputers, advanced machine learning, AI, and other tools from the wonderful world of advanced data science wizardry, is it now possible to predict the future “most accurately”?
Let us see.
We will run the analysis using default settings in [smoov.bra.in2023]
First, we evaluate the known params:
-I exist
-The world exists
-My conscious mind creates existence
-The universe is infinite
-There is danger in the universe
-I will cease to exist
bla bla bla
Now, let us consider a function of a complex variable f(z) = wut + tf where we assign spiritual armageddon, an end-times battle, global warming, AI, aliens, nuclear war, and the heat death of the universe a specific weight to form a probabilistic argument to estimate the chance that an apocalyptic event will occur, and/or the event’s place in spacetime, and/or the number of active events that may occur within or beyond our star.
Let us import the vars into our shitty bathroom formula:
tf² [(x²) + (y²) + y(z²)] + ded
P = ——————————————
ÎŁi (7x – war + wut²)
Solving for wut + tf we can conclude with a 69.699% probability that shit happens and that shit will continue to happen until shit happening ceases to occur.
Or our ability to observe shit happening is terminated by a lack of conscious mind manifestation.
Therefore, scientifically, shit happens and then shit ceases to happen. But one must possess the conscious ability to observe shit happening for scary shit to happen, leading to the end, where shit ceases to happen.
What the f*ck does this even mean?
From a mathematical perspective, if/when a doomsday event ever happens, it will mathematically always be closer than ever before, so we are naturally “racing towards it.”
This is a true function of spacetime as it is understood at this time-period in The Simulation.
Similarly, it is a mathematical fact that, right now, you are older now than you were when you first started reading this long and boring shitty analysis.
Taking this into account, surely some “genius” at some point in the timeline will accurately predict the end, and then I guess we will be blown up and/or float into the sun.
The heat death of the universe.
The end of the world.
Time Preference notwithstanding, who will be alive to document and profess the greatest prophecy ever known?
Will a single history book survive?
Will anyone be around to sing songs heralding the greatest prediction of all time?
Are we all alone in an uncaring universe?
At the time of this writing, tweeted under my hand, this 5th day of July, anno Domini 2023; where we sit Neanderthal on one hand and Singularity on the other, where any such event of significance and power (nuclear or otherwise) may catapult us forward into the future or a thousand years back into the dark ages, no man yet has ever possessed the knowledge to know things unseen, but often, will speak prophecy about the end according to his taste.
Therefore, it would seem that the paradox of prophetic brilliance is a brutal one, because it means the fool must be intelligent enough to recognize that he is, in fact, a fool.
It is in a sense, a meta-layer of ignorance – the ignorance of your own ignorance.
A massive contradiction.
How can a person correct an error if they don’t even know they’ve made any such error?
The very thing that would help us see our mistakes is the same thing that would keep us from making them in the first place.
A brain perfidy of epic proportions.
A Dunning–Kruger event in the rarest of forms.
I have theorized that when it comes to scientific knowledge, it seems that the more we learn, the more we realize we don’t know.
An inverse relationship of knowledge if you will.
We learn that we do not know.
We do not even know how much there is TO know.
How can knowledge, therefore, even be measured?
Can one ever know all that there is?
Therefore, I surmise that in our universe, in its infinite stochasticity and mystery, the expert cannot exist.
In a world where many aspects remain beyond our current comprehension and cognitive abilities, it should be impossible, in a practical sense, for any such claim of universal mastery or expertise to be true.
The expert should be an impossibility in this continuum of spacetime. One can merely be a highly advanced student. And new students will pick up the torch when yours is extinguished, continuing the path. A slow burning step-function.
And this highly advanced student, self-aware enough to recognize he knows many things, but also that he is completely clueless, is a different beast entirely than the bold claiming prophet.
This new “intelligent predictor” (if you will) should understand the inherently speculative nature of prophecy, which, more than likely, requires one to step outside the container of perpetual “nows” and into the black hole that is the future.
Into the unknown.
Into the realm of inexistence.
The nothingness.
Into the void.
But, alas, the void is where we must play, and yet, we know nothing of the void.
We can assume, however, that inside exists a complex and dynamic world, or possibly many worlds, all influenced by numerous factors, many of which are far beyond the knowledge and understanding of the Earthly, carbon-based student predictor.
And outside of that void lies the realm of imperfect information and obscurantism.
So, what then of the future?
Can it be accurately calculated and foretold?
Will we all die a fiery, nuclear death on this day? In this year?
Given the infinitely stochastic nature of the void (a realm devoid of consistency or asymptotic normality), it has proven nearly impossible to accurately forecast the future given the: (1) intricate interplay of the variables (known and unknown); (2) constraints of our inherent cognitive biases which limit our predictive abilities; (3) natural psychological drive to overestimate the likelihood of catastrophic events due to availability heuristic/fear/sensationalism; (4) fact that many phenomena of the cosmos (on Earth and elsewhere in the universe) remain mysterious and beyond our current comprehension.
This is not to say that we do not live under constant threat of annihilation (whether self-inflicted or otherwise), and my intent is not to be dismissive of danger (whether clear and present) or in the future.
This planet is a dangerous place, a place full of terror and fright, a place where chaos and uncertainty rule the day, a land of stochasticity.
Here, in the Earthly realm, we are faced with perpetual menace, almost as a universal rule, a function of society, an inescapable reality, such as it is – these menaces including war, pestilence, economic, and environmental – but throughout history, these events have confined themselves to become mere blips in spacetime, often self-correcting, and rarely sustaining the durability of total planetary annihilation.
Barking more furiously than they bite.
But alas, perhaps we can conclude, albeit from a practical perspective, and based on the high probability of prophetic failure and our inability to make accurate assessments of future events, that the biggest threats to humankind are not so much external (war/economic/ecological), but instead, a threat from within, a threat of the mind.
Referencing our axis above, one could argue that the common-mind has, over the generations, been self-poisoned and atrophied by daily prescription doses of both cynicism and paranoia; and is now in a rapid decline into a strange kind of premature senility, a zombie-like state, numb to reality.Â
With a mind almost atrophied and paralyzed from gross lack of use (unable to move from step-to-step on the reasoning path) and so wearily uninterested in anything healthy, nothing but the heaviest stimulants of an ever-increasing violence and destruction can move it.
Thus, in order to cope, one must steadily increase the dose of cynicism each day.
As such, it would seem that of all the various poisons which the common-modern thinker, by a process of autointoxication and qualitative delusion, brews quietly up within his own bowels, few, it seems to me, are more deadly (while none appears more innocuous) than that curious and dreadful thing that is commonly known as “cynicism.”
But cynicism is not the only dangerous mind poison on the pharmaceutical menu for the common-modern mind.
On the opposite end of the pseudo-intellectual mind spectrum is optimism, which, despite its limitations, is hailed by many as the “optimal way” to see and experience the world.
But, quite often, optimism is used blindly, as simply a lazy, mind-numbing way to block out the effects of the paranoia, to feel safe; which for many who are stuck on the reasoning path, not knowing whether to go up or down, left or right, remain stuck, frozen and unable to move, which on a planet where perpetual menace exists, doing such can expose oneself to great risk.
Therefore, neither cynicism nor optimism is accurate or objective.
Neither is in touch with reality.
In reality, things aren’t all bad or all good, they are just as they are, or as they seem.
In my best estimation, and through the eyes of this self-admitted clueless observer, life on this planet appears to be, in the most general sense, an intricate series of “bad,” “good,” and neutral events.
Somewhere inside there lies realism.
And so, when making big and bold quantitative predictions about the universe, the realist must account for all data (irrespective of its positive or negative quality), but this data set very likely exceeds the computational power and size of all systems on Earth combined by millions of orders of magnitudes.
But, alas, for the sake of this shitty analysis, let us take a more pragmatic approach.
If we, very simply, take into account the accretion of human knowledge across many fields, the amount of data that exists, the capacity of discovery, etcetera, etcetera… you can make a very strong argument that the day you’re alive (today) is quantitatively the best day that’s ever happened, and tomorrow is going to be even better.
It is a continuum of better tomorrows, possibly even more than countable infinity.
We have no way of truly knowing (yet).
That said, it will be interesting to see what the textbooks of the future will say about many of our current era assumptions/theories/predictions in 1,000 years, as data computation/analysis on a large scale is often a very slow burn.
Quite a few of our assumptions/theories/predictions from this age will hold the test of time, I’m sure, but most of it will likely be proven incomplete or inaccurate (especially the assumptions and theories that you’ve read here today).
This is both reassuring (because we’re constantly learning/evolving/optimizing) but also unsettling because we really have no idea what we’re doing.
Note: If none of this makes sense to you, it is likely a runtime error… [smoov.bra.in2023] needs more CPU and RAM to process fully but the simulation params have prevented this. This is an ongoing issue that the developers expected but have been unable to correct.
Welcome to the danger zone.
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