it’s kind of like being the kind of person who, when observing having survived quantum russian roulette 20 times in a row, assumes that the gun is broken rather than saying “i guess i might have low quantum amplitude now” and fails to realize that the gun can still kill them — which is bad when all of our hopes and dreams rests on those assumptions
Yes, this is exactly the reason why you shouldn’t update on “antropic evidence” and base your assumptions on it. The example with quantum russian roulette is a bit of a loaded one (pun intended), but here is the general case:
You have a model of reality, you gather some evidence which seem to contradict this model. Now you can either update your model, or double down on it, claiming that all the evidence is a bunch of outliners.
Updating on antropics in such situation is refusing to update your model when it contradicts the evidence. It’s adopting an anti-laplacian prior while reasoning about life or death (survival or extinction) situations—going a bit insane specifically in the circumstances with the highest stakes possible.
Yes, this is exactly the reason why you shouldn’t update on “antropic evidence” and base your assumptions on it. The example with quantum russian roulette is a bit of a loaded one (pun intended), but here is the general case:
You have a model of reality, you gather some evidence which seem to contradict this model. Now you can either update your model, or double down on it, claiming that all the evidence is a bunch of outliners.
Updating on antropics in such situation is refusing to update your model when it contradicts the evidence. It’s adopting an anti-laplacian prior while reasoning about life or death (survival or extinction) situations—going a bit insane specifically in the circumstances with the highest stakes possible.