taw comments on Contrarianism and reference class forecasting - Less Wrong

26 Post author: taw 25 November 2009 07:41PM

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Comment author: taw 27 November 2009 10:48:00AM -1 points [-]

I thought I addressed this with "usually not just barely enough to be discounted by anthropic principle, but spectacularly so" part. Anthropic principle style of reasoning can only be applied to disasters that have binary distributions - wipe out every observer in the universe (or at least on Earth), or don't happen at all - or at least extremely skewed power law distributions.

I don't see any evidence that most disasters would follow such distribution. I expect any non-negligible chance of destruction of humanity by nuclear warfare implying an almost certainty of limited scale nuclear warfare with millions dying every couple of years.

I think anthropic principle reasoning is so overused here, and so sloppily, that we'd be better off throwing it away completely.