One particularly important thing I got out of this post was crystallizing a complaint I sometimes have about people using anthropic reasoning. If someone says there’s trillion-to-1 evidence for (blah) based on anthropics, it’s actually not so crazy to say “well I don’t believe (blah) anyway, based on the evidence I get from observing the world”, it seems to me.
Or less charitably to myself, maybe this post is helping me rationalize my unjustified and unthinking gut distrust of anthropic reasoning :-P
One particularly important thing I got out of this post was crystallizing a complaint I sometimes have about people using anthropic reasoning. If someone says there’s trillion-to-1 evidence for (blah) based on anthropics, it’s actually not so crazy to say “well I don’t believe (blah) anyway, based on the evidence I get from observing the world”, it seems to me.
Or less charitably to myself, maybe this post is helping me rationalize my unjustified and unthinking gut distrust of anthropic reasoning :-P
Anyway, great post.