CarlShulman comments on Existential Risk and Public Relations - Less Wrong
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Of course, if you buy the self-indication assumption (which I do not) or various other related principles you'll get an update that compels belief in quite frequent life (constrained by the Fermi paradox and a few other things).
More relevantly, approaches like Robin's Hard Step analysis and convergent evolution (e.g. octopus/bird intelligence) can rule out substantial portions of "crazy-hard evolution of intelligence" hypothesis-space. And we know that human intelligence isn't so unstable as to see it being regularly lost in isolated populations, as we might expect given ludicrous anthropic selection effects.
I looked at Nick's:
http://www.anthropic-principle.com/preprints/olum/sia.pdf
I don't get it. Anyone know what is supposed to be wrong with the SIA?