gwern comments on Open Thread, August 2010 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: NancyLebovitz 01 August 2010 01:27PM

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Comment author: gwern 13 October 2010 07:25:51PM 0 points [-]

I've read "Anthropic Shadow" a few times now. I don't think I will write a post on it. It does a pretty good job of explaining itself, and I couldn't think of any uses for it.

The Shadow only biases estimates when some narrow conditions are met:

  1. your estimate has to be based strictly on your past
  2. of a random event
  3. the events have to be very destructive to observers like yourself
  4. and also rare to begin with

So it basically only applies to global existential risks, and there aren't that many of them. Nor can we apply it to interesting examples like the Singularity, because that's not a random event but dependent on our development.