To be clear, I think the main flaw of a lot of anthropics in practice is ignoring other sources of evidence, and I suspect a lot of the problem really does boil down to conservation of expected evidence violations plus ignoring other, much larger sources of evidence.
This is why the most general versions of the simulation hypothesis/Mathematical Universe Hypothesis/computational functionalism hypothesis for consciousness are not properly speaking valid Bayesian hypotheses, because every outcome could count as confirmation of the theory, so it is utterly useless for prediction.
It’s a great universal ontology, but it’s predictive power is precisely 0.
More positively speaking, the hypotheses are just the assumed things they have for Bayesians, similarly to how logical omniscience is just assumed for Bayesians, and thus it’s great to have a universal tool-kit, but that does come with the downside of having 0 ability to predict anything (because it contains everything).
I agree with this!
“Update away from” does not imply “discard”.
To be clear, I think the main flaw of a lot of anthropics in practice is ignoring other sources of evidence, and I suspect a lot of the problem really does boil down to conservation of expected evidence violations plus ignoring other, much larger sources of evidence.
On this:
This is why the most general versions of the simulation hypothesis/Mathematical Universe Hypothesis/computational functionalism hypothesis for consciousness are not properly speaking valid Bayesian hypotheses, because every outcome could count as confirmation of the theory, so it is utterly useless for prediction.
It’s a great universal ontology, but it’s predictive power is precisely 0.
More positively speaking, the hypotheses are just the assumed things they have for Bayesians, similarly to how logical omniscience is just assumed for Bayesians, and thus it’s great to have a universal tool-kit, but that does come with the downside of having 0 ability to predict anything (because it contains everything).