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Regardless of what you think about the concept of hinginess, I'm thoroughly unconvinced by the arguments presented against it in this article. The first one fo

Regardless of what you think about the concept of hinginess, I'm thoroughly unconvinced by the arguments presented against it in this article. The first one for example, seems like an adapted doomsday argument: given that we continue to exist for x years at a certain societal level, and given the certainty of a hinge, our prior for the hinge being this century would be very low. But this is begging the question. The entire point of a hinge is that we don't know if we're going to continue to exist at a certain level of development, thus our assumptions required to develop the prior are dependent on our conclusion that this isn't the period of the hinge. The other arguments boil down to accusations of bias. These are a little more substantial in that we do actually know these biases exist, and we should account for them. But that doesn't mean necessary that we're not living in a hingey period. It's not necessarily an argument against moreso than a stern warning that more research is needed and the conclusion isn't warranted yet. I'd think there should be stronger arguments against the premise, and some comments in this post have given far better arguments already.

kokey 6y ago
That's also what stood out to me. It's almost like the article was painting the hypothesis as something a lot of people who 'feel' the same way (as the author) is trying to prove it to be true without going into why do they feel that way and how much bias is in that. Sure, technology is developing fast, but its been quite fast since just before the start of the industrial revolution or when humans started walking or farming etc. I would speculate during those times of rapid development of some of the historical civilisations there was probably just as much of a feeling of it being at a hinge as now. It's just that right now we like to attract people's attention and creating suspense and that sense of hingeyness is good at attracting attention and there's now a lot of money to be made from attracting attention. Not just money, but you can drive political action if you give people this kind of sense of do or die urgency. This could turn the hypothesis into a self fulfilling prophecy. That's why we need better arguments against it.

kokey 6y ago

That's also what stood out to me. It's almost like the article was painting the hypothesis as something a lot of people who 'feel' the same way (as the author) is trying to prove it to be true without going into why do they feel that way and how much bias is in that. Sure, technology is developing fast, but its been quite fast since just before the start of the industrial revolution or when humans started walking or farming etc. I would speculate during those times of rapid development of some of the historical civilisations there was probably just as much of a feeling of it being at a hinge as now. It's just that right now we like to attract people's attention and creating suspense and that sense of hingeyness is good at attracting attention and there's now a lot of money to be made from attracting attention. Not just money, but you can drive political action if you give people this kind of sense of do or die urgency. This could turn the hypothesis into a self fulfilling prophecy. That's why we need better arguments against it.