Ask HN: What ever happened to probabilistic thinking?
4 arisAlexis 4 9/1/2025, 7:37:29 AM
I thought probabilistic thinking was the way programmers and rational people in the tech & science world used.
Lately I see b&w messaging like:
"We will never cure aging". "We will never reach AGI in our lifetimes". "AI has 0% of catastrophic risk - Lecunn". Etc.
How can people in tech think in absolutes? Why not think "hey, maybe there is 10% we cure aging or 10% chance we all die and these are super important"? After all isn't it obvious to everybody that probability * magnitute = impact?
Said more clearly so we don't get into a discussion about correctness of percentages:
Possible and Impossible are hugely different.
Because "maybe there is 10%" of anything is an absolutely useless metric. It's even more useless as a projection of a future event contingent on unknowable future breakthroughs. A percentage doesn't offer any useful modelling in those scenarios.
Unless you believe in determinism or prophetic eschatology, knowing the percent chance that we "cure aging" is always a lie. The most powerful science and most accurate statistics can't read the future.