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Qiaochu_Yuan comments on "Stupid" questions thread - Less Wrong Discussion

40 Post author: gothgirl420666 13 July 2013 02:42AM

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Comment author: drethelin 13 July 2013 04:04:29AM 15 points [-]

Why does anyone care about anthropics? It seems like a mess of tautologies and thought experiments that pays no rent in anticipated experiences.

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 13 July 2013 04:51:41AM *  5 points [-]

The obvious application (to me) is figuring out how to make decisions once mind uploading is possible. This point is made, for example, in Scott Aaronson's The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine. What do you anticipate experiencing if someone uploads your mind while you're still conscious?

Anthropics also seems to me to be relevant to the question of how to do Bayesian updates using reference classes, a subject I'm still very confused about and which seems pretty fundamental. Sometimes we treat ourselves as randomly sampled from the population of all humans similar to us (e.g. when diagnosing the probability that we have a disease given that we have some symptoms) and sometimes we don't (e.g. when rejecting the Doomsday argument, if that's an argument we reject). Which cases are which?

Comment author: ESRogs 13 July 2013 06:39:34AM *  5 points [-]

figuring out how to make decisions once mind uploading is possible

Or even: deciding how much to care about experiencing pain during an operation if I'll just forget about it afterwards. This has the flavor of an anthropics question to me.