I don't understand the first part of your comment. Different anthropic principles give different answers to e.g. Sleeping Beauty, and the type of dissolution that seems most promising for that problem doesn't feel like what I'd call 'using anthropic evidence'. (The post I just linked to in particular seems like a conceptual precursor to updateless thinking, which seems to me like the obviously correct perfect-logically-omniscient-reasoner solution to anthropics.)

Can you give a concrete example of what you see as an example of where anthropic reasoning wins (or would win if we performed a simple experiment)? If anything, experiments seem like they would highlight ambiguities that naïve anthropic reasoning misses; if I try to write 'halfer' and 'thirder' computer programs for Sleeping Beauty to see which wins more, I run into the problem of defining the payoffs and thereby rederive the dissolution ata gave in the linked post.

Ah, that's good to know. Thanks for the suggestion!

It's not enough to say "the act of smoking". What's the causal pathway that leads from the lesion to the act of smoking?

Exactly, that's part of the problem. You have a bunch of frequencies based on various reference classes, without further information, and you have to figure out how the agent should act on that very limited information, which does not include explicit, detailed causal models. Not all possible worlds are evenly purely causal, so your point about causal pathways is at best an incomplete solution. That's the hard edge of the problem, and even if the correct answer turns out to be 'it depends' or 'the question doesn't make sense' or involves a dissolution of reference classes or whatever, then one paragraph isn't going to provide a solution and cut through the confusions behind the question.

It seems like your argument proves too much because it would dismiss taking Newcomb's problem seriously. 'It's not enough to say the act of two-boxing...' I don't think your attitude would have been productive for the progression of decision theory if people had applied it to other problems that are more mainstream.

It has a clear answer (smoking doesn't cause cancer), and it's only interesting because it can trip up attempts at mathematising decision theory.

That's exactly the point Wei Dai is making in the post I linked!! Decision theory problems aren't necessarily hard to find the correct specific answers to if we imagine ourselves in the situation. The point is that they are litmus tests for decision theories, and they make us draw up more robust general decision processes or illuminate our own decisions.

If you had said

If so, I don't think it can be meaningfully answered, as any answer you come up with it while thinking about it on the internet doesn't apply to the smoker, as they're using a different decision-making process.

in response to Newcomb's problem, then most people here would see this as a flinch away from getting your hands dirty engaging with the problem. Maybe you're right and this is a matter whereof we cannot speak, but simply stating that is not useful to those who do not already believe that, and given the world we live in, can come across as a way of bragging about your non-confusion or lowering their 'status' by making it look like they're confused about an easily settled issue, even if that's not what you're (consciously) doing.

If you told a group building robot soccer players that beating their opponents is easy and a five-year-old could do it, or if you told them that they're wasting their time since the robots are using a different soccer-playing process, then that would not be very helpful in actually figuring out how to make/write better soccer-playing robots!

I don't think you're taking the thought experiment seriously enough and are prematurely considering it (dis)solved by giving a Clever solution. E.g.

If it's not the urge, what is it?

Obvious alternative that occurred to me in <5 seconds: It's not the urge, it's the actual act of smoking or knowing one has smoked. Even if these turn out not to not quite work, you don't show any sign of having even thought of them, which I would not expect if you were seriously engaging with the problem looking for a reduction that does not leave us feeling confused.

Edit: In fact, James already effectively said 'the act of smoking' in the comment to which you were replying!

becomes interesting if even after accounting for the urge to smoke, whether you actually smoke provides information on whether you are likely to get lung cancer.

If I took the time to write a comment laying out a decision theoretic problem and received a response like this (and saw it so upvoted), I would be pretty annoyed and suspect that maybe (though not definitely) the respondent was fighting the hypothetical, and that their flippant remark might change the tone of the conversation enough to discourage others engaging with my query.

I've been frustrated enough times by people nitpicking or derailing (even if only with not-supposed-to-be-derailing throwaway jokes) my attempts to introduce a hypothetical that by this point I would guess that in most cases it's actually rude to respond like this unless you're really, really sure that your nitpick of a premise actually significantly affects the hypothetical or that you've got a really good joke. In Should World people would evaluate the seriousness of a thought experiment on its merits and not by the immediate non-serious responses to it, but experience says to me that's not a property of the world we actually live in.

If I'm interpreting your comment correctly, you're either stating that it's not the case that people's brains make rational probability estimates (which everybody on friggin' LessWrong will already know!), or denying a very specific, intentionally artificial statement about the relation between credences and anxiety that was constructed for a decision theory thought experiment. In either case I'm not sure what the benefits of your comment are.

Am I missing something that you and the upvoters saw in your comment?

Edit: Okay, it occurs to me that maybe you were making an extremely tongue-in-cheek, understated rejection of the premise for comical effect--'Haha, the thought experiments we use are far divorced from the actual vagaries of human thought'. The fact I found it so hard to get this suggests to me that others probably didn't get the intended interpretation of your comment, which still leaves potential for it to have the negative effects I mentioned above. (E.g. maybe someone got your joke immediately, had a hearty laugh, and upvoted, but then the other upvoters thought they were upvoting the literal interpretation of your post.)

Yep, I find the world a much less confusing place since I learned capitals and location on map. I had (and to some extent still do have) a mental block on geography which was ameliorated by it.

Rundown of positive and negative results:

In a similar but lesser way, I found learning English counties (and to an even lesser extent, Scottish counties) made UK geography a bit less intimidating. I used this deck because it's the only one on the Anki website I found that worked on my old-ass phone; it has a few howlers and throws some cities in there to fuck with you, but I learned to love it.

I suspect that learning the dates of monarchs and Prime Ministers (e.g. of England/UK) would have a similar benefit in contextualising and de-intimidating historical facts, but I never finished those decks and haven't touched them in a while, so never reached the critical mass of knowledge that allowed me to have a good handle on periods of British history. I found it pretty difficult to (for example) keep track of six different Georges and map each to dates, so slow progress put me off. Let me know if you're interested and want to set up a pact, e.g. 'We'll both do at least ten cards from each deck a day and report back to the other regularly' or something. In fact that offer probably stands for any readers.

I installed some decks for learning definitions in areas of math that I didn't know, but found memorising decontextualised definitions hard enough that I wasn't motivated to do it, given everything else I was doing and Anki-ing at the time. I still think repeat exposure to definitions might be a useful developmental strategy for math that nobody seems to be using deliberately and systematically, but I'm not sure Anki is a right way to do it. Or if it is, that shooting so far ahead of my current knowledge was the best way to do it. Similarly a LaTeX deck I got having pretty much never used LaTeX and not practising it while learning the deck.

Canadian provinces/territories I have not yet found useful beyond feeling good for ticking off learning the deck, which was enough for me since I did them in a session or two.

Languages Spoken in Each Country of the World (I was trying to do not just country-->languages but country-->languages with proportions of population speaking the languages) was so difficult and unrewarding in the short term that I lost motivation extremely quickly (this was months ago). The mental association between 'Berber' and 'North Africa' has come up a surprising number of times, though. Most recently yesterday night.

Periodic table (symbol<--->name, name<-->number) took lots of time and hasn't been very useful for me personally (I pretty much just learned it in preparation for a quiz). Learning just which elements are in which groups/sections of the Periodic table might be more useful and a lot quicker (since by far the main difficulty was name<--->number).

I am relatively often wanting for demographic and economic data, e.g. population of countries, population of major world cities, population of UK places, GDP's. Ideally I'd not just do this for major places since I want to get a good intuitive sense of these figures for very large or major places on down to tiny places.

Similarly if one has a hobby horse it could be useful. Examples off the top of my head (not necessarily my hobby horse): Memorising the results from the LessWrong surveys. Memorising the results from the PhilPapers survey. Memorising data about resource costs of meat production vs. other food production. Memorising failed AGI timeline predictions. Etc.

I found starting to learn Booker Prize winners on Memrise has let me have a few 'Ah, I recognise that name and literature seems less opaque to me, yay!' moments, but there's probably higher-priority decks for you to learn unless that's more your area.

So my mind state is more likely in a five-sibling world than a six-sibling one, but using it as anthropic evidence would just be double-counting whatever evidence left me with that mind state in the first place.

Yep; in which case the anthropic evidence isn't doing any useful explanatory work, and the thesis 'Anthropics doesn't explain X' holds.

Yes! There's a lot of ways to remove the original observer from the question.

The example I thought of (but ended up not including): If all one's credence were on simula(ta)ble (possibly to arbitrary precision/accuracy even if perfect simulation were not quite possible) models and one could specify a prior over initial conditions at the start of the Cold War, then one could simulate each set of initial conditions forward then run an analysis over the sets of initial conditions to see if any actionable causal factors showed up leading to the presence or absence of a nuclear exchange.

A problem with this is that whether one would expect such a set of simulations to show a nuclear exchange to be the usual outcome or not is pretty much the same as one's prior for a nuclear exchange in the non-simulated Cold War, by conservation of expected evidence. But maybe it suffices to at least show that the selection effect is irrelevant to the causal factors we're interested in. Certainly it gives a way to ask such questions that has a better chance of circumventing anthropic explanations in which one might not be interested.

Is this in support of or in opposition to the thesis of the post? Or am I being presumptuous to suppose that it is either?