Laplace’s result comes from a uniform prior over the probability of the sun not rising, updated on observations. It’s sort of the maximally uniformative prior.
However, the Doomsday argument is an extra update on top of evidence that we’ve already seen. If we know the priors, we don’t have a doomsday effect. So unless we genuinely do think that each year there’s an independent probability of doom, draw with fixed but unknown probability p, Laplace’s sunrise problem and the doomsday argument shouldn’t apply, right?
if we use Goth equation to the correct class of observers, it is not update of what we already know about the whole human history. The correct class of observers is not humans, but only scientists who think about doomsday argument and the birth date is the date when that person first started thinking about Doomsday argument as rank order between all such scientists. All such scientists live is approximately same period of human history (end of 20 century—beginning of 21) and thus know the same things about risks, also risk are much more uniform for such shorted period.
Putting numbers in this gives doom in the middle of 21 century with obvious caveats.
After some conversation with Fable, it said to me that uniform prior over probabilities in Laplace, and being in the middle of actually existing observers in Gott—are basically the same idea. So the mechanism is that randomness put me in the middle. But this requires the reality of future.
Carter in his book about extinction spent a lot of pages to show that this requires that unitary future do actually exist or at least deterministic, so the sampling process is happening from the future too. This contradicts my MWI intuitions (But may be can solved via distribution analyses)
I think the mechanism is different, and is based on idea that there are many different civilizations and we measure their average age (universal doomsday argument). If we лтцш average age, we can also extrapolate it on us. For example, if I ask a random person on a street what is his age and he said that his age 47, I can conclude that human average age is several decades years—and thus my average age is the same. This trick escapes direct “reading” of the information from the future.
Laplace’s result comes from a uniform prior over the probability of the sun not rising, updated on observations. It’s sort of the maximally uniformative prior.
However, the Doomsday argument is an extra update on top of evidence that we’ve already seen. If we know the priors, we don’t have a doomsday effect. So unless we genuinely do think that each year there’s an independent probability of doom, draw with fixed but unknown probability p, Laplace’s sunrise problem and the doomsday argument shouldn’t apply, right?
if we use Goth equation to the correct class of observers, it is not update of what we already know about the whole human history. The correct class of observers is not humans, but only scientists who think about doomsday argument and the birth date is the date when that person first started thinking about Doomsday argument as rank order between all such scientists. All such scientists live is approximately same period of human history (end of 20 century—beginning of 21) and thus know the same things about risks, also risk are much more uniform for such shorted period.
Putting numbers in this gives doom in the middle of 21 century with obvious caveats.
But what is the mechanism by which the doomsday argument works? The Laplace example has a clear prior powering it, but why should it apply here?
After some conversation with Fable, it said to me that uniform prior over probabilities in Laplace, and being in the middle of actually existing observers in Gott—are basically the same idea. So the mechanism is that randomness put me in the middle. But this requires the reality of future.
Carter in his book about extinction spent a lot of pages to show that this requires that unitary future do actually exist or at least deterministic, so the sampling process is happening from the future too. This contradicts my MWI intuitions (But may be can solved via distribution analyses)
I think the mechanism is different, and is based on idea that there are many different civilizations and we measure their average age (universal doomsday argument). If we лтцш average age, we can also extrapolate it on us. For example, if I ask a random person on a street what is his age and he said that his age 47, I can conclude that human average age is several decades years—and thus my average age is the same. This trick escapes direct “reading” of the information from the future.