The argument at the start just seems to move the anthropics problem one step back—how do we know whether we “survived”* the cold war?
*Not sure how to succinctly state this better; I mean if Omega told me that the True Probability of surviving the Cold War was 1%, I would update on the safety of the Cold War in a different direction than if it told me 99%, even though both entail me, personally, surviving the Cold War.
how do we know whether we “survived”* the cold war?
We estimate how likely it is we are delusional about the universe, versus us surviving the cold war. Omega would have to put the probability of survival pretty low before I started to consider delusions as the most likely option.
What seems to be a “true probability” is usually something subtly different—a parameter in a toy model of the world. Omega knows you survived juat as well as you did—its P(survived) is 1, true as can be. When you talk about “true probability”, you are talking about some property of a mental model of the cold war—the same category of thing as “dangerousness,” which makes comparing the two more like a direct analogy than a probabilistic update.
The argument at the start just seems to move the anthropics problem one step back—how do we know whether we “survived”* the cold war?
*Not sure how to succinctly state this better; I mean if Omega told me that the True Probability of surviving the Cold War was 1%, I would update on the safety of the Cold War in a different direction than if it told me 99%, even though both entail me, personally, surviving the Cold War.
We estimate how likely it is we are delusional about the universe, versus us surviving the cold war. Omega would have to put the probability of survival pretty low before I started to consider delusions as the most likely option.
What seems to be a “true probability” is usually something subtly different—a parameter in a toy model of the world. Omega knows you survived juat as well as you did—its P(survived) is 1, true as can be. When you talk about “true probability”, you are talking about some property of a mental model of the cold war—the same category of thing as “dangerousness,” which makes comparing the two more like a direct analogy than a probabilistic update.
See also: probability is in the mind..