Recently the Large Hadron Collider was damaged by a mechanical failure. This requires the collider to be warmed up, repaired, and then cooled down again, so we're looking at a two-month delay.
Inevitably, many commenters said, "Anthropic principle! If the LHC had worked, it would have produced a black hole or strangelet or vacuum failure, and we wouldn't be here!"
This remark may be somewhat premature, since I don't think we're yet at the point in time when the LHC would have started producing collisions if not for this malfunction. However, a few weeks(?) from now, the "Anthropic!" hypothesis will start to make sense, assuming it can make sense at all. (Does this mean we can foresee executing a future probability update, but can't go ahead and update now?)
As you know, I don't spend much time worrying about the Large Hadron Collider when I've got much larger existential-risk-fish to fry. However, there's an exercise in probability theory (which I first picked up from E.T. Jaynes) along the lines of, "How many times does a coin have to come up heads before you believe the coin is fixed?" This tells you how low your prior probability is for the hypothesis. If a coin comes up heads only twice, that's definitely not a good reason to believe it's fixed, unless you already suspected from the beginning. But if it comes up heads 100 times, it's taking you too long to notice.
So - taking into account the previous cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) - how many times does the LHC have to fail before you'll start considering an anthropic explanation? 10? 20? 50?
After observing empirically that the LHC had failed 100 times in a row, would you endorse a policy of keeping the LHC powered up, but trying to fire it again only in the event of, say, nuclear terrorism or a global economic crash?
So if I think that (something like) the Self-Indication Assumption is correct, what about Nick's standard thought experiment in which the silly philosopher thinks she can derive the size of the cosmos from the fact she's alive?
Well, the experiment does worry me, but I'd like to note that self-sampling without self-indication produces, in fact, a very similar result (if the reference class is all conscious observers, which Nick's version of the experiment seem to assume). I give you The Presumptuous Philosopher and the Case of the Twin Stars:
If you accept this thought experiment (which requires only self-sampling) but reject a variation where T1 is ruled out because it predicts that cosmological death rays will make life impossible in all galaxies but one in a trillion (which requires self-sampling), then I think you've allowed yourself to be suckered into implicitly assuming that conscious observation is something ontologically fundamental. Though I accept that you may not be convinced of this yet :-)
(Side note: Lest you be biased against the philosopher just because she dares to apply probability theory, do also consider the case where T1 predicts that Mars had a chance of 4/5 per year of flying out of the solar system since it came into existence -- and beat those odds by random chance every single time. Of course, in that case, the physicists would already be convinced that her reasoning is sound, to the tune that they would already have applied it itself.)