How and how not to make predictions with temporal copernicanism

Kevin Nelson

pp. 91-111

in: Synthese 166 (1), 2009.

Abstract

Gott (Nature 363:315–319, 1993) considers the problem of obtaining a probabilistic prediction for the duration of a process, given the observation that the process is currently underway and began a time t ago. He uses a temporal Copernican principle according to which the observation time can be treated as a random variable with uniform probability density. A simple rule follows: with a 95% probability,