antigonus comments on What are you working on? - Less Wrong

9 Post author: jsalvatier 06 October 2011 04:19PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (97)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: antigonus 08 October 2011 04:28:02AM *  3 points [-]

Have you read Darren Bradley's Multiple Universes and Observation Selection Effects? If so, do you group it into the category of unacceptably a priori arguments? Because it sounds somewhat similar, and I remember finding it convincing at the time I read it.

Comment author: AlexSchell 08 October 2011 07:41:20PM *  2 points [-]

Yes, I've read Bradley's paper, and his approach is the best I've seen so far. It raises all the right questions and has been very helpful to me personally in giving me an idea of what form a plausible reply to the inverse gambler's fallacy argument would take. I do indeed think his approach collapses into an argument that is almost a priori / barely sensitive to fine-tuning (unless one adopts a fairly ad hoc metaphysical view of the necessary and sufficient conditions of your existence, a view that Bradley makes explicit in a forthcoming paper). Bradley's argument can be fixed by rejecting the methodological principle he implicitly relies on (which is the idea that the correct "selection procedure" is "biased", in his technical sense, toward your existence; Roger White also relies on this idea, which he calls the "observation principle") and replacing it with the self-sampling assumption with an at least moderately inclusive and universe-neutral reference class.