This question has been bugging me for the last couple of years here. Clearly Eliezer believes in the power of anthropics, otherwise he would not bother with MWI as much, or with some of his other ideas, like the recent writeup about leverage. Some of the reasonably smart people out there discuss SSA and SIA. And the Doomsday argument. And don't get me started on Boltzmann brains...
My current guess that in the fields where experimental testing is not readily available, people settle for what they can get. Maybe anthropics help one pick a promising research direction, I suppose. Just trying (unsuccessfully) to steelman the idea.
r/Fitness does a weekly "Moronic Monday", a judgment-free thread where people can ask questions that they would ordinarily feel embarrassed for not knowing the answer to. I thought this seemed like a useful thing to have here - after all, the concepts discussed on LessWrong are probably at least a little harder to grasp than those of weightlifting. Plus, I have a few stupid questions of my own, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that other people might as well.