First of all, this has nothing to do with Everett interpretation
If you toss a coin a million times while thoroughly investigating and preventing any cause of significant bias, and it always comes up "heads", this starts looking like a compelling argument to stop tossing the coin; maybe "tails" triggers a gun.
First, how do you reconcile your second statement with the first one? I must be missing something. Second, if anthropics save us from ourselves via quantum immortality, that's a good reason to be less careful, not stop tossing the coin.
Suppose people were trying to make LHC and similar machines work for 1000 years and never succeeded
I'm sure there are plenty of examples of problems which ended up being much harder than they appeared, but were eventually solved (Fermat's last theorem? Human flight?) or will be eventually solved (fusion energy? Machine vision? You name some), all are arguments for the anthropic principle... until they are no longer. They all have specific reasons for failures, unrelated to anthropics. I would keep looking for those reasons and ignore the athropics altogether as an unproductive hypothesis.
how do you reconcile your second statement with the first one?
What Everett interpretation gives you is some sense of "actuality" of hypotheticals, but when thinking about possible futures you don't need all (any!) of the hypothetical possibilities to be "actual". Not knowing which possibility obtains would result in the same line of argument as when you assume that they all obtain.
Assuming you are being killed if a coin falls up "tails", only the hypotheticals where all coins fall "heads" will contain you observin...
Today's post, How Many LHC Failures Is Too Many? was originally published on 20 September 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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