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CannibalSmith comments on It's not like anything to be a bat - Less Wrong
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Can we dismiss all anthropic reasoning by saying that probability is meaningless for singular events? That is, the only way to obtain probability is from statistics, and I cannot run repeated experiments of when, where, and as what I exist.
That's entirely contrary to the Bayesian program that this site broadly endorses: throwing out the subjective probability baby with the anthropic bath water, as it were.
What, really? Wait, what!? Uh.
Also, dear reader, vote parent up or down to tell me whether he's correct about you.
No, probability is not "meaningless for singular events". We can meaningfully discuss, in Bayesian terms, the probability of drawing a red ball from a jar, even if that jar will be destroyed after the single draw. The probabilities are assessments about our state of knowledge.
Therefore no, we cannot dismiss all anthropic reasoning for the reasons you suggested.
If you got "probability is meaningless for singular events" from what you learned here, either you are confused, or I am. (Possibly both.)
No, because it isn't isn't meaningless.
No, you can get it from mathematics. Even basic arithmetic. Infinite series of events, on the other hand, those are hard to come by.
I dismiss many examples of (bad) anthropic reasoning because they assume that that the probability of their subjective experience is what you get if you draw a random head out of a jar of all things that meet some criteria of self awareness.
Kind of. Read Probability is subjectively objective
The frequentist dogma was the 'contrary' part, not the 'maps/territory' stuff. Probability doesn't come from statistics and definitely applies to single events.
Statistics is, of course, one source of knowledge we can usefully apply in calculating probabilities.
It seems to me that the disagreement here is because you're looking at different parts of the problem. It might well be said that you can't have a well-calibrated prior for an event that never happened before, if that entails that you actually don't know anything about it (and that might be what you're thinking of). On the other hand, you should be able to assign a probability for any event, even if the number mostly represents your ignorance.