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I am increasingly hearing that the US is in a state of impending collapse from a variety of sources, and I always ask, well if it is, how much time do we have?

I am increasingly hearing that the US is in a state of impending collapse from a variety of sources, and I always ask, well if it is, how much time do we have? In the absence of any method for accurate forecasting, I defer to J. Richard Gott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Richard_Gott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Richard_Gott. According to his method, which he used successfully to predict when the Berlin Wall would come down, the US probably has about 800 years left, based on a 75% chance it has lived about a quarter of its life.

TheCoelacanth 9y ago
You aren't applying that method correctly. The method is just making the assumption that you are observing a entity at a point in its lifetime that is randomly distributed with a uniform distribution. So there is a 75% chance that you are in the middle 75% of its lifetime (i.e. somewhere from 12.5% to 87.5% through its lifetime) and there is a 95% chance that you are in the middle 95% (somewhere from 2.5% to 97.5% through the lifetime). The US is currently 242 years old, so the 75% confidence interval for its total lifespan is 276-1,936 years for an expected end date of 2052-3712. The 95% confidence interval end dates are 2024-11,456. Applying it in reverse, the chance of it collapsing within my expected lifetime is 18%. That's not exactly comforting.
devnonymous 9y ago
No. I'm sorry but what of Gott's methods are you specifically using to justify that claim?