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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Outlawing Anthropics: An Updateless Dilemma - Less Wrong
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It seems promising that several people are converging on the same "updateless" idea. But sometimes I wonder why it took so long, if it's really the right idea, given the amount of brainpower spent on this issue. (Take a look at http://www.anthropic-principle.com/profiles.html and consider that Nick Bostrom wrote "Investigations into the Doomsday Argument" in 1996 and then did his whole Ph.D. on anthropic reasoning, culminating in a book published in 2002.)
BTW, weren't the SIAI summer interns supposed to try to write one LessWrong post a week (or was it a month)? What happened to that plan?
People are crazy, the world is mad. Also inventing basic math is a hell of a lot harder than reading it in a textbook afterward.
I suppose you're referring to the fact that we are "designed" by evolution. But why did evolution create a species that invented the number field sieve (to give a random piece of non-basic math) before UDT? It doesn't make any sense.
In what sense is it "hard"? I don't think it's hard in a computational sense, like NP-hard. Or is it? I guess it goes back to the question of "what algorithm are we using to solve these types of problems?"
No, I'm referring to the fact that people are crazy and the world is mad. You don't need to reach so hard for an explanation of why no one's invented UDT yet when many-worlds wasn't invented for thirty years.
I also don't think general madness is enough of an explanation. Both are counterintuitive ideas in areas without well-established methods to verify progress, e.g. building a working machine or standard mathematical proof techniques.