Logically, as I see the world, it's more like 40 minutes to midnight!
Why, though?
My biggest problem with the Doomsday clock is that we have no way to measure "closeness to doomsday" in any meaningful sense, so we have no check against it. The numbers add a pretence of quantification, but without a way to map "minutes to midnight" to actual states of the world, you might as well call it a gut feeling. It's equally imprecise, but its honest about being unquantifiable.
Given that, why "11:20" over any other number? Why not 6 o'clock? Why not noon?
It's best to IGNORE all super-dire predictions. It actually hampers morale and the ability to better the world. I don't need bullshit telling me it's futile!
Here I disagree. Super-dire predictions should be taken seriously. Species go extinct all the ungoddamned time, humans are clever but we are not magically protected from that risk. Everything we know suggests we can kill ourselves off, or be killed by external events, or lose a big chunck of the population, and these are
bad things we need to take seriously in order to protect ourselves against them. Morale is important, obviously; if you personally can't work properly by thinking too much about doom, then don't think too much about doom. But some people can, and are even motivated by the idea that if we don't do something we might all die.
Sometimes people need positive thinking. Sometimes they need a kick in the ass to get them moving.
The Doomsday clock has been pretty accurate. We have been close to nuclear annihilation several times just because we are unable to get along well and the great powers thought they needed to have a dick waving contest with nuclear weapons.
How would we know, though? Nuclear annihilation hasn't actually happened, so there's no empirical check on the Doomsday clock. It's difficult to define (let alone measure) "closeness to annihilation" when we cannot actually observe annihilation*.
We can look at times the clock moved forward/ backwards and say "yes, this looks like a thing that would move us closer/further away from extinction", but that's not accuracy. The doomsday clock is not a careful algorithm analysing global events, it's an intuitive guess (by very smart people, maybe, but still an intuitive guess). Comparing that to our intuitive sense of what will cause extinction is not a useful confirmation, because you're just comparing the intuition of one group of people vs that of another group of people.
Which means we have no real tests of the Doomsday clock (and no idea how one would even go about testing it), we're just taking the judgement of experts at face value.
Tetlock's work suggests this is not very reliable.
And saying "everything is fine, everything will turn out fine, you guys are doing great" would not have helped much during the Cuban missile crisis for example.
Probably not. But is there any reason to think that presenting the information in symbolic clock form actually makes a difference? Surely people can say "hey, conflict between nuclear powers that can escalate into nuclear war, that sounds dangerous" without looking at a clock.
*There are also anthropic arguments that suggest we should not expect to observe a universe where we are "close" to annihilation in some sense, but this is probably not the same meaning of "close" that the Doomsday clock is meant to reflect.
