alexflint comments on How inevitable was modern human civilization - data - Less Wrong
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Be careful of anthropic bias here. Taken alone, the argument "life did not die out on Earth" is invalid because if it had, we wouldn't be here. However, the second point, that when some evolutionary niche is wiped out it is quickly colonized, would seem to me to be valid, since it suggests systematic resilience to disaster.
I think my reasoning is valid even with anthropic principle. If life wasn't resilient, we should expect by anthropic principle to have no major disasters in the past, not to have survived major disasters.