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PlaidX comments on The Presumptuous Philosopher's Presumptuous Friend - Less Wrong
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To me, that just indicates that anthropic reasoning is valid, or at least that what we're calling anthropic reasoning is valid.
Well, that just means that you're doing ordinary reasoning, of which anthropic reasoning is a subset. It does not follow that this (and topics like it) is anthropic reasoning. And no, you don't get to define words however you like: the term "anthropic reasoning" is supposed to carve out a natural category in conceptspace, yet when you use it to mean "any reasoning from arbitrary premises", you're making the term less helpful.
If it doesn't carve out such a category, maybe that's because it's a malformed concept, not because we're using it wrong. Off the top of my head, I see no reason why the existence of the observer should be a special data point that needs to be fed into the data processing system in a special way.
Strangely enough, that's actually pretty close to what I believe -- see my comment here.
So, despite all this arguing, we seem to have almost the same view!
Still, given that it's a malformed concept, you still need to remain as faithful as possible to what it purports to mean, or at least note that your example can be converted into a clearly non-anthropic one without loss of generality.
Fair enough!