Louie comments on Anthropics makes sense with shorter people - Less Wrong

24 Post author: KatjaGrace 11 April 2011 10:58PM

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Comment author: Louie 12 April 2011 02:27:21PM 2 points [-]

when I saw the title my initial thought was that it was talking about people who were short in stature.

Agreed.

Did you ever figure out what the intended meaning was?

Comment author: JoshuaZ 12 April 2011 04:12:33PM 2 points [-]

No. I tentatively think that it might mean that it makes sense with beings with shorter histories?

Comment author: shokwave 12 April 2011 04:20:08PM 4 points [-]

I'm fairly convinced that it means "Anthropics makes sense with one person for each moment - each person being very short (as measured by their time of existence)."

Comment author: KatjaGrace 12 April 2011 05:55:13PM 2 points [-]

Me too

Comment author: JoshuaZ 14 April 2011 01:16:06AM 0 points [-]

Thanks for the clarification. Although I wonder if one can make a serious sort of anthropic argument about size. one shouldn't expect to find to be a member of a large species since that means that there's less room for lots of observers of that type. So we should expect to be large enough to be able to discuss anthropic reasoning but not much larger.

Comment author: Swimmer963 12 April 2011 06:42:14PM 0 points [-]

People who only exist for a short period of time. Once I read the actual article, I thought the title was a clever pun, but I can see how it could be confusing.