All of nostalgebraist2point0's Comments + Replies
110
This all seems like exploiting ambiguity about what your conditional probabilities are conditional on.
Conditional on "you will be around a supercritical ball of enriched uranium and alive to talk about it," things get weird, because that's such a low-probability event to begin with. I suspect I'd still favor theories that involve some kind of unknown/unspecified physical intervention, rather than "the neutrons all happened to miss," but we should notice that we're conditioning on a very low probability event and things wi
6
On the Cold War thing, I think the lesson to learn depends on whether situations that start with a single nuclear launch reliably (and rapidly) escalate into world-destroying conflicts.
If (nuclear launch) -> (rapid extinction), then it seems like the anthropic principle is relevant, and the close calls really might have involved improbable luck.
If, on the other hand, (nuclear launch) -> (perhaps lots of death, but usually many survivors), then this suggests the stories of how close the close calls were are exaggerated.
IMO, the anthropic principle boils down to "notice when you are trying to compute a probability conditional on your own existence, and act accordingly."
A really simple example, where the mistake is obvious(ly wrong), is "isn't it amazing that we live on a planet that's just the right distance from its star (etc.) to support life?" No, this can't be amazing. The question presupposes a "we" who live on some planet, so we're looking for something like P(we live on a habitable planet | we are inhabiting a pla