= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
nyan_sandwich comments on Is our continued existence evidence that Mutually Assured Destruction worked? - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
Comments (67)
Why are "observers" ontologically fundamental in these anthropic arguments? Is there somewhere an analysis of this assumption? I know that there is SSA and SIA, but I don't really understand them.
How do you assign probability over worlds with different numbers of observers?
An elaboration on the coin demon example. Let's say flipping "tails" instantly kills half the people. There are three things that can happen when the coin is flipped:
Now imagine you're looking back at a coin that was flipped earlier: 1/3 of the time you'll see tails and 2/3 you'll see heads.
If a tree falls on sleeping beauty might be useful.
I don't understand it, either. I mean, I understand the logic, I just don't understand how an assumption like that can ever be tested, short of Omega coming down to Earth and introducing a fellow simulation to us. Maybe we could talk about this at a meetup.
Here's a funny test: if many people flip coins to decide whether to have kids, and SSA is true, then the results should be biased toward "don't have kids". Bostrom's book discusses similar scenarios, I think, but I'm still pretty proud of coming up with them independently :-)
Could you elaborate?
See chapter 9 of Bostrom's book. His analysis seems a little weird to me, but the descriptions of the scenarios are very nice and clear.
Good idea. We can make confusing anthropic stuff a future topic. Perhaps this weekend even.
Huh, I thought the meetups are on hiatus for the summer, since they don't show up in the regular or irregular LW meetup announcements.
Not at all. I'm just too lazy to post them a lot of the time.
The general rule is every saturday at 15:30 at bennys.
Many treatments of this issue use "observer moments" as a fundamental unit over which the selection occurs, expecting themselves to be in the class of observer-moments most common in the space of all observer moments.