Thanks. By “smaller miracle,” are you referring to the case that Julia’s estimates are wrong? Or something else?
Agreed that expecting a high fraction of observers to survive a nuclear war makes anthropic selection a less-appealing explanation. Would be interesting to see the numbers.
I interpret Julia’s “I would have put a probability of maybe 25% on a lot of those. But it starts to add up. [...] which kind of throws into question my ability to assign good probabilities to all of these near misses.” to mean that the 25% estimates are either wrong or not independent, because there were too many such events, and the multiplied probabilities of being lucky at all of them is just too small.
So there is probably some other explanation… but Julia in the quoted text does not propose a specific alternative. She just says that if there was only one such event in history, then explanation “25% extinction, 75% we got lucky” would be a good explanation of our current state; but now that she knows there were actually many such events, it does not seem like a good explanation anymore.
Thanks. By “smaller miracle,” are you referring to the case that Julia’s estimates are wrong? Or something else?
Agreed that expecting a high fraction of observers to survive a nuclear war makes anthropic selection a less-appealing explanation. Would be interesting to see the numbers.
I interpret Julia’s “I would have put a probability of maybe 25% on a lot of those. But it starts to add up. [...] which kind of throws into question my ability to assign good probabilities to all of these near misses.” to mean that the 25% estimates are either wrong or not independent, because there were too many such events, and the multiplied probabilities of being lucky at all of them is just too small.
So there is probably some other explanation… but Julia in the quoted text does not propose a specific alternative. She just says that if there was only one such event in history, then explanation “25% extinction, 75% we got lucky” would be a good explanation of our current state; but now that she knows there were actually many such events, it does not seem like a good explanation anymore.