I’ve been genuinely confused about all these antropics stuff and read your sequence in hope for some answers. Now I understand better what are SSA and SIA. Yet am not even closer to understanding why would anyone take these theories seriously. They often don’t converge to normality, they depend on weird a priori reasoning which doesn’t resemble the way cognition engines produce accurate maps of the territory.
SSA and SIA work only in those cases where their base asumptions are true. And in different circumstances and formulations of mind experiments different assumptions would be true. Then why, or why, for the sake of rationality are we expecting to have universal theory/referent class for every possible case? Why do we face this false dilemma, which ludicrous bullet to bite? Can we rather not?
Here is a naive idea for a supperior antropics theory. We update on antropic evidience only if both SSA and SIA agree that we are to. That saves us from all the presumptious cases. That prevents us from having precognitive, telekenetic and any other psychic powers to blackmail reality, while allowing us to update on God’s equal numbers coin toss scenarios.
I’m pretty sure there are better approaches, I’ve heard of lots of good stuff about UDT, but haven’t yet dived deep enough inside it. I’ve found someintuitivelycompelling aproaches to antropics on LW. Than why do we even consider SSA or SIA? Why are people amused by Grabby Aliens or Doomsday Argument in 2021?
I’ve been genuinely confused about all these antropics stuff and read your sequence in hope for some answers. Now I understand better what are SSA and SIA. Yet am not even closer to understanding why would anyone take these theories seriously. They often don’t converge to normality, they depend on weird a priori reasoning which doesn’t resemble the way cognition engines produce accurate maps of the territory.
SSA and SIA work only in those cases where their base asumptions are true. And in different circumstances and formulations of mind experiments different assumptions would be true. Then why, or why, for the sake of rationality are we expecting to have universal theory/referent class for every possible case? Why do we face this false dilemma, which ludicrous bullet to bite? Can we rather not?
Here is a naive idea for a supperior antropics theory. We update on antropic evidience only if both SSA and SIA agree that we are to. That saves us from all the presumptious cases. That prevents us from having precognitive, telekenetic and any other psychic powers to blackmail reality, while allowing us to update on God’s equal numbers coin toss scenarios.
I’m pretty sure there are better approaches, I’ve heard of lots of good stuff about UDT, but haven’t yet dived deep enough inside it. I’ve found some intuitively compelling aproaches to antropics on LW. Than why do we even consider SSA or SIA? Why are people amused by Grabby Aliens or Doomsday Argument in 2021?