Oh yeah, I should have made this clear in my reply to you (I’d written it in a different comment just a moment before):
I do find anthropic problems puzzling. What I find nonsensical are framings of those problems that treat indexical information as evidence—e.g. in a scenario where person X (i.e. me) exists on both hypothesis A and hypothesis B, but hypothesis A implies that many more other people exist, I’m supposed to favour hypothesis B because I happen to be person X and that would be very unlikely given hypothesis A.
If I roll a million-sided die, then no individual number rolled on it is more surprising than any other, not even a roll of 1 or 1,000,000 — UNLESS I’m playing an adversarial game where me rolling a 1 is uniquely good for my opponent. Then if I roll a 1 I should wonder if the die was fixed.
However, no matter your paranoia level, “a malicious opponent broke causality to send me back through time to be born before humanity got to go to the stars” is not a plausible physical theory. (No, not even under Hindu mythology: they’d send you forward to incarnate at the corresponding point in the next Kalpa cycle, instead.)
If I roll a million-sided die, then no individual number rolled on it is more surprising than any other, not even a roll of 1 or 1,000,000 — UNLESS I’m playing an adversarial game where me rolling a 1 is uniquely good for my opponent. Then if I roll a 1 I should wonder if the die was fixed.
Yes, but if you haven’t looked at the die yet, and the question of whether it’s showing a number lower than 100 is relevant for some reason, you’re going to strongly favour ‘no’.
(That’s not quite how I think about anthropic problems, though, because I don’t think there’s anything analogous to the dice roll—hence my original complaint about smuggled dualism.)
Oh yeah, I should have made this clear in my reply to you (I’d written it in a different comment just a moment before):
If I roll a million-sided die, then no individual number rolled on it is more surprising than any other, not even a roll of 1 or 1,000,000 — UNLESS I’m playing an adversarial game where me rolling a 1 is uniquely good for my opponent. Then if I roll a 1 I should wonder if the die was fixed.
However, no matter your paranoia level, “a malicious opponent broke causality to send me back through time to be born before humanity got to go to the stars” is not a plausible physical theory. (No, not even under Hindu mythology: they’d send you forward to incarnate at the corresponding point in the next Kalpa cycle, instead.)
Yes, but if you haven’t looked at the die yet, and the question of whether it’s showing a number lower than 100 is relevant for some reason, you’re going to strongly favour ‘no’.
(That’s not quite how I think about anthropic problems, though, because I don’t think there’s anything analogous to the dice roll—hence my original complaint about smuggled dualism.)
Agreed, on all counts