private_messaging comments on On saving the world - Less Wrong

101 Post author: So8res 30 January 2014 08:00PM

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Comment author: private_messaging 23 February 2014 12:04:08PM 3 points [-]

It seems to me that winning the leverage lottery (by being at the dawn of an intergalactic civilization) is not like flipping a few hundred coins and getting a random bitstring that was not generated in that fashion, anywhere else in our Hubble volume. It is like flipping a few hundred coins and getting nothing but heads.

Yeah, exactly. The issue is not so much the 10^-80 prior, as the 10^-80 prior on obtaining it randomly vs much much larger prior of obtaining it because, say, you can't visually discriminate between the coin sides.