Predicting future duration from present age: Revisiting a critical assessment of Gott's rule

Abstract

Gott has promulgated a rule for making probabilistic predictions of the future duration of a phenomenon based on the phenomenon's present age [Nature, Vol. 363, 315 (1993)]. I show that the two usual methods for deriving Gott's rule are flawed. Nothing licenses indiscriminate use of Gott's rule as a predictor of future duration. It should only be used when the phenomenon in question has no identifiable time scales.

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