Why do people think we have a one in six chance of going extinct soon

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Why do people think we have a one in six chance of going extinct soon
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Should we be worried?

An asteroid will hit Earth one day, but when? In 2020, Oxford-based philosopher Toby Ord published a book called The Precipice about the risk of human extinction. He put the chances of ‘existential catastrophe’ for our species during the next century at one in six. It’s quite a specific number, and an alarming one. The claim drew headlines at the time, and has been influential since – most recently brought up by Australian politician Andrew Leigh during a speech in Melbourne.

A ranking system for outcomes There is another way to think about probability, called Bayesianism after the English statistician Thomas Bayes. It focuses less on events themselves and more on what we know, expect and believe about them. In very simple terms, we can say Bayesians see probabilities as a kind of ranking system.

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