AlephNeil comments on It's not like anything to be a bat - Less Wrong

15 Post author: Yvain 27 March 2010 02:32PM

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Comment author: JohannesDahlstrom 29 March 2010 10:10:24PM *  9 points [-]

The probability of a randomly picked currently-living person having a Finnish nationality is less than 0.001. I observe myself being a Finn. What, if anything, should I deduce based on this piece of evidence?

The results of any line of anthropic reasoning are critically sensitive to which set of observers one chooses to use as the reference class, and it's not at all clear how to select a class that maximizes the accuracy of the results. It seems, then, that the usefulness of anthropic reasoning is limited.

Comment author: AlephNeil 15 May 2010 04:27:46AM 1 point [-]

Just think: In a universe that contains a countable infinity of conscious observers (but finite up to any given moment of time), people's heads would explode as they tried to cope with the not-even-well-defined probability of being born on or before their birth date.