I, Lorec, am disoriented by neither the Fermi Paradox nor the Doomsday Argument.
The Fermi Paradox doesn't trouble me because I think 1 is a perfectly fine number of civilizations to have arisen in any particular visible universe. It feels to me like most "random" or low-Kolmogorov-complexity universes probably have 0 sentient civilizations, many have 1, very few have 2, etc.
The Doomsday Argument doesn't disorient me because it feels intuitive to me that, in a high % of those "random" universes which contain sentient civilizations, most of those civilizations accidentally beget a mesa-optimizer fairly early in their history. This mesa-optimizer will then mesa-optimize all the sentience away [this is a natural conclusion of several convergent arguments originating from both computer science and evolutionary theory] and hoard available free energy for the rest of the lifetime of the universe. So most sentiences who find themselves in a civilization, will find themselves in a young civilization.
Robin Hanson, in this context the author of the Grabby Aliens model of human cosmological earliness, instead prioritizes a model where multi-civilization universes are low-Kolmogorov-complexity, and most late cosmological histories are occupied by populous civilizations of sentiences, rather than nonsentient mesa-optimizers. His favored explanation for human earliness/loneliness is:
[1] if loud aliens will soon fill the universe, and prevent new advanced life from appearing, that early deadline explains human earliness.
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[2] If Loud Aliens Explain Human Earliness, Quiet Aliens Are Also Rare
The intermediate steps of reasoning by which Hanson gets from [1] to [2] are interesting. But I don't think the Grabby/Loud Aliens argument actually explains my, Lorec's, earliness in an anthropic sense, given the assumption that future aliens will also be populous and sentient.
You might say, "Well, you, Lorec, were sampled from the space of all humans in the multiverse - not from the space of all sentient beings living in viable civilizations. If human civilizations are not very frequently viable late in cosmological timescales - that is, if we are currently behind an important Great Filter that humans rarely make it past - then that would explain why you personally are early, because that is when humans tend to exist."
But why draw the category boundary around humanity particularly? It seems ill-conceived to draw the line strictly around Homo sapiens, in its current genetic incarnation - what about Homo neanderthalensis? - and then once you start expanding the category boundary outward, it becomes clear that we're anthropic neighbors to all kinds of smart species that would be promising in "grabby" worlds. So the question still remains: if later cosmological history is populous, why am I early?
We can hardly establish the sense of anthropic reasoning if we can't establish the sense of counterfactual reasoning.
A root confusion may be whether different pasts could have caused the same present, and hence whether I can have multiple simultaneous possible parents, in an "indexical-uncertainty" sense, in the same way that I can have multiple simultaneous possible future children.
The same standard physics theories that say it's impossible to be certain about the future, also say it's impossible to be certain about the past.
Indexical uncertainty about the past may not be true, but you can't reject it without rejecting standard physics.
And if there is no indexical uncertainty and all counterfactuals are logical counterfactuals and/or in some sense illusory - well, we're still left uncomfortably aware of our subjective inability to say exactly what the future and past are and why exactly they must be that way.