It is a well estabilished fact in probability that you cannot treat on the same footing a naive notion of surprise and the happening of an event of low probability. The classical example is the extraction from a set of large cardinality with uniform distribution: one of the occurences is bound to happen, but each has a very low probability. If you let naive surprise guide your model selection, and you do not have a sound base for model generation, you start falling into a slippery slope that culminates in solipsism.
Case in point: we have three universes, one is normal, one is magical (biased toward our existence), one is solipsistic (biased toward my existence). Clearly, since we exists, the magical is much more probable than the normal, but since I exist, the universe was probably born to allow me to write you in this exact moment (after all, what are the probability that I was born between the trillion of other possible beings?).
So if you generate a number randomly between one and one million, each number has a one in a million chance of being chosen. Like, if I get the number 5, I can say that it is unlikely that it is a coincidence, as there was only a one in a million chance of this happening. However, there is no reason why I wouldn’t have said the same thing if I received a 6 or 335,687. So there isn’t really a coincidence or a surprised, because regardless of result, we could have said something similar.
I don’t believe in the magical universe theory either. My point was simply that the anthropic principle is not an effective counter-argument. If the maths suggests that a magical universe exists or that a sophistic universe exists, I suspect that you’ve probably set the prior probabilities to be too high.
It is a well estabilished fact in probability that you cannot treat on the same footing a naive notion of surprise and the happening of an event of low probability.
The classical example is the extraction from a set of large cardinality with uniform distribution: one of the occurences is bound to happen, but each has a very low probability.
If you let naive surprise guide your model selection, and you do not have a sound base for model generation, you start falling into a slippery slope that culminates in solipsism.
Case in point: we have three universes, one is normal, one is magical (biased toward our existence), one is solipsistic (biased toward my existence). Clearly, since we exists, the magical is much more probable than the normal, but since I exist, the universe was probably born to allow me to write you in this exact moment (after all, what are the probability that I was born between the trillion of other possible beings?).
So if you generate a number randomly between one and one million, each number has a one in a million chance of being chosen. Like, if I get the number 5, I can say that it is unlikely that it is a coincidence, as there was only a one in a million chance of this happening. However, there is no reason why I wouldn’t have said the same thing if I received a 6 or 335,687. So there isn’t really a coincidence or a surprised, because regardless of result, we could have said something similar.
I don’t believe in the magical universe theory either. My point was simply that the anthropic principle is not an effective counter-argument. If the maths suggests that a magical universe exists or that a sophistic universe exists, I suspect that you’ve probably set the prior probabilities to be too high.