I am familiar with Smolin's objections, but I don't buy them. His argument hinges on accepting an outmoded Popperian philosophy of science. I don't think it holds if one adopts a properly Bayesian perspective. In any case, I think my particular form of anthropic argument counts as a selection effect within one world, a form of argument to which even he doesn't object.

As for the ubiquity of Second Law-obeying systems, I admit it is something I have thought about and it does worry me a little. I don't have a fully worked response, but here's a tentative answer: If there were the occasional spontaneously entropy decreasing macroscopic system in our environment, the entropy decrease would be very difficult to corral. As long as such a system could interact with other systems, we could use it to extract work from those other systems as well. And, as I said, if most of the systems in our environment were not Second Law-obeying, then we could not exercise our agency by learning about them and acting on them based on what we learn. So perhaps there's a kind of instability to the situation where a few systems don't obey the Second Law while the rest do that explains why this is not the situation we're in.