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Grognor comments on Open Thread, March 16-31, 2012 - Less Wrong
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A meta-anthropic explanation for why people today think about the Doomsday Argument: observer moments in our time period have not solved the doomsday argument yet, so only observer moments in our time period are thinking about it seriously. Far-future observer moments have already solved it, so a random sample of observer moments that think about the doomsday argument and still are confused are guaranteed to be on this end of solving it.
(I don't put any stock in this. [Edit: this may be because I didn't put any stock in the Doomsday argument either.])
If the conditions of this argument were true, it would annul the Doomsday Argument, thus bringing about its own conditions!
Yes, that's my favorite thing about it and the reason I considered it worthy of posting. (It only works if everyone knows about it, though.)
You have reduced the DA to an absurdity, which comes from the DA itself. Clever.
Any self referencing is quite a dangerous thing for a statement. If something can be self referenced it is often prone to some paradoxical consequences what invalidates it.
The moon and sun are almost exactly the same size as seen from Earth, because in worlds where this is not the case, observers pick a different interesting coincidence to hold up as non-anthropic in nature.
What?
Meta-anthropics is fun!
But if even a tiny fraction of future observers thinks seriously about the hypothesis despite knowing the solution...
My current guess is that having the knows-the-solution property puts them in a different reference class. But if even a tiny fraction deletes this knowledge...
Isn't this true about any conceivable hypothesis?
Yes, but most hypotheses don't take the form, "Why am I thinking about this hypothesis?" and so your comment is completely irrelevant.
To elaborate: the doomsday argument says that the reason we find ourselves here rather than in an intergalactic civilization of trillions is because such a civilization never appears. I give a different explanation which relies on the nature of anthropic arguments in general.