I think that anthropic reasoning only works when you have a good model of how you could have gotten into the situation in question.

For the beginning of the universe kinds of questions, as I see it, the options boil down to:

1) Is something vaguely like String Theory correct, in which a near-infinite ensemble of universes with different laws is created at the dawn of time, or continuously across time?

2) Are the laws we observe actually perfectly fundamental, and they just happen to be right?

3) Did some entity pick out these laws?

Anthropic reasoning gives us no reason to go for 2, but it is perfectly happy with 1, since it lets us discard all of the parts of the universe with rules that don't produce life capable of considering the question.

Some other rules for the 2-4-6 game, so you can keep going if they get the first one:

• The set has an even number in it

• All three are 1-digit numbers

• All three must be numbers

• Whatever the numbers are, you alternate between replying 'yes' and 'no' (helps to be writing them down in this case)

Try to have more than one hypothesis under consideration at every time, and choose guesses which distinguish them.

It was half-joking; I don't actually know how serious you are or how much thought you've put into the recommended number of posts. What I meant to imply was that the mention of "20" as a starting point made you pick a higher number as a counter-offer than you would pick if you'd come at the question cleanly.

reference: Wikipedia Anchoring article.

You've been anchored.

Condensing it down to a comment in an existing thread rather than a top-level post would be wise.

A failed attempt is more decisive and teaches us more than a series of blog posts.

Mostly, I'm saying "don't waste time on more posts". If that means dropping the idea entirely and doing something more useful (perhaps posting on a more interesting topic), ok. If that means creating something and posting about how to use it, ok.

1) I loved Usenet prior to Eternal September, and used it through much of the 90s as well. It's not coming back.

I'm part of another group which tried replacing their disfunctional mailing lists with NNTP, and probably a dozen of us used it for a month or two before we realized that nobody else was coming and went back to the main group.

2) Running code trumps theoretical arguments. Don't write a series of posts, set up your system and see if it works.

[Survey Taken Thread]

By ancient tradition, if you take the survey you may comment saying you have done so here, and people will upvote you and you will get karma.

Let's make these comments a reply to this post. That way we continue the tradition, but keep the discussion a bit cleaner.

The two cases are non-analogous.

I strongly agree, and in fact when I read the OP I nearly stopped when I saw this argument. (Because it's so transparently wrong that if someone finds it a good analogy, that's evidence that they aren't thinking clearly about this stuff.)

The vast majority of yes/no questions you're likely to face won't support 5% intervals. You're just not going to get enough data to have any idea whether the "true" calibration is what actually happens for that small selection of questions.

That said, I agree there's an analytic flaw if you can change true to false on no additional data (kind of: you noticed salience of something you'd previously ignored, which may count as evidence depending on how you arrived at your prior) and only reduce confidence a tiny amount.

One suggestion that may help: don't separate your answer from your confidence confidence, just calculate a probability. Not "true, 60% confidence" (implying 40% unknown, I think, not 40% false), but "80% likely to be true". It really makes updates easier to calculate and understand.

As fuzzy as the foundations-of-QM arguments are, anthropics are WAY fuzzier.