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<\/a><\/p>\nIn 1969, John Gott <\/a>looked at the Berlin Wall and asked himself how long it would stand<\/a>.<\/p>\n The wall was 8 years old at the time.<\/p>\n He could be witnessing something that would stand many years to come or something that would fall down tomorrow.<\/p>\n In certain domains, you can make the inference that you are observing a thing at a random point in its lifetime, and this is what Gott did.<\/p>\n He figured that if he’s witnessing it 50% of the way through its lifetime, then it would stand another 8 years (Because it has been up 8 years and is halfway through its life).<\/p>\n He figured that if he’s witnessing it 5% of the way through its lifetime, then it would stand another 152 years. (Because if 8 years is 5% of its life, then 160 years is 100% of its life. Since it has been up for 8 years, it has 152 years left).<\/p>\n He figured that if he’s witnessing it 95% of the way through its lifetime, then it would stand another 5 months. (Because if 8 years is 5% of its life then 8.42 years is 100% of its life, Since it has already been up 8 years, it has .42 years, or five months, left).<\/p>\n In this way, Gott came up with a principle for estimating confidence intervals for the lifetimes of certain classes of things. A 95% CI for the lifetime of the Berlin Wall would be 8.42 to 160 years, which contains the age of the wall (about 28 years) when it came down.<\/p>\n Gott’s principle was also used to predict the predict the closing dates of 44 Broadway and Off-Broadway shows<\/a>, and was about 95% correct<\/a>.<\/p>\n So there you have it, a heuristic for predicting the lifetimes of things. It doesn’t apply everywhere (e.g., it doesn’t work on human lives), but it’s kind of fun.<\/p>\n REFERENCES Gott, J.R. (1994). Future prospects discussed. Nature, 368, 108.<\/p>\n Photo credit: http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/siyublog\/1982035178\/<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So there you have it, an heuristic for predicting the lifetimes of things. It doesn’t apply everywhere (e.g., it doesn’t work on human lives), but it’s kind of fun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[16],"tags":[402,403,398,399,22,401,400,31,79],"class_list":["post-3422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ideas","tag-bayesian","tag-copernican-principle","tag-gott","tag-gotts-principle","tag-heuristics","tag-life-expectancy","tag-lifetime","tag-prediction","tag-rules-of-thumb"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4LKj-Tc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3422"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3444,"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3422\/revisions\/3444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nGott, J.R. (1993). Implications of the Copernican principle for our future prospects. Nature, 363, 315\u2013319.<\/p>\n