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cousin_it comments on The Hero With A Thousand Chances - Less Wrong
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I'm not sure why it took me this long to realize this, but by the anthropic principle, the Counter-Force is almost certainly not the anthropic principle, but something that really exists in the world, e.g., some kind of intelligent agent, physical force, principle of magic, or rule of simulation.
Consider two worlds that are otherwise identical except that world A has a real Counter-Force, and world B doesn't. Initially, world A has lower measure since it has higher complexity. But as time goes on, the fraction of world A that survives will massively outweigh the fraction of world B that survives. So, both the Hero and Aerhien should conclude that they're almost certainly in world A.
Wait, doesn't the same argument prove the existence of a God in our world that keeps rescuing life from disaster?
No, because our world hasn't had as many "lucky coincidences" as Aerhien's. It seems to me that we are not seeing more "lucky coincidences" than a typical evolved intelligent species would see, looking back on the history of its world.
I think the most we can say is that there hasn't been a disaster in our history that would have required great luck to stop. Our world has nothing like the dust; our destruction is not nearly that intrinsically assured. So whatever coincidence saved us, anthropomorphically, would not look like an Act of Great Luck; it would look like the sort of thing that you could convince yourself in retrospect must have been more probable than it seemed at the time. Long, drawn-out sequences of individually credible chances.