nyan_sandwich comments on No Anthropic Evidence - Less Wrong

9 Post author: Vladimir_Nesov 23 September 2012 10:33AM

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Comment author: FeepingCreature 23 September 2012 09:35:11PM *  2 points [-]

Well, either way you're in a vanishingly-unlikely future. I think it's that we don't appreciate the unlikelihood of our own existence to some extent - being alive, we expect that event to have been somewhat expected. In the branch where you die with every tails throw, going by quantum immortality thinking, you expect to observe yourself throwing only heads, and you fail to internalize how much this diminishes your measure - ie. you don't account for your failing branches. In the branch where you may throw tails without dying, the reasoning goes, you would have expected - almost certainly, in fact - to see a fairly even distribution of heads and tails, so the event of seeing no tails feels unlikelier there, despite having the same likelihood.

Comment author: [deleted] 24 September 2012 08:29:38PM 2 points [-]

What's this about quantum? Coins are pretty well deterministic in the quantum sense.

Comment author: FeepingCreature 26 September 2012 04:26:46PM *  0 points [-]

The notion that you should not anticipate observing outcomes that entail a failure of your ability to observe or remember observing them, while coherent in a deterministic universe, is at least to me, solidly associated with the quantum suicide/immortality thought experiment.

rephrase: yeah, I didn't think of that.