LESSWRONG
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All of nathanwe's Comments + Replies

Doomsday Argument and the False Dilemma of Anthropic Reasoning
nathanwe2-1

I think people are just choosing comparison sets wrong? Using the bag anology, there are two pieces of paper labeled "6" so upon being handed a random piece of paper labeled "6" I should be 50/50 as to whether it came from the first bag or the second bag, No?

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1Nebu
Imagine someone named Omega offers to play a game with you. Omega has a bag, and they swear on their life that exactly one of the following statements is true: 1. They put a single piece of paper in the bag, and it has "1" written on it. 2. They put 10 trillion pieces of paper in the bag, numbered "1", "2", "3", etc. up to ten trillion. Omega then has an independent neutral third party reach into the bag and pull out a random piece of paper which they then hand to you. You look at the piece of paper and it says "1" on it. Omega doesn't get to look at the piece of paper, so they don't know what number you saw on that paper. Now the game Omega propose to you is: If you can guess which of the two statements was the true one, they'll give you a million dollars. Otherwise, you get nothing. Which do you guess? Do you guess that the bag had a single piece of paper in it, or do you guess that the bag had 10 trillion pieces of paper in it?
2CrimsonChin
Eh I didn't think you can just ignore facts like the components of the bag. You could actually do this experiment, and the probability won't be 50%.
Natural Latents: The Concepts
nathanwe33

In the Alice and Bob example aren't the rules of the game part of the natural latent? Like Carol also needs to remember that neither Alice nor Bob will draw any [color that isn't purple] lines and this information isn't in the green lines.

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4tailcalled
Conditional on the rules, the green lines serve as a natural latent between the pictures, so knowing the rules induce a phase change where the green lines become a natural latent. But without knowing the rules, you can't infer the rules from only one picture, and so the rules cannot serve as a natural latent, even when combined with the green lines.
Boltzmann brain's conditional probability
nathanwe10

I think there is a misunderstanding as what counts as an observation. I think your point of view is something like  "Yesterday I experienced a universe consistent with the laws of physics, and the day before that I experienced a universe consistent with the laws of physics and so on. I'm about 30 years old so that's 10,950 observations" to which I ask "If you have all that knowledge, what did you have for dinner 78 days ago? Was it consistent with the laws of physics?" to make the rhetorical point that a boltsman brain does not need to fake any history, it only needs to fake your current memories of history, a much easier task. Boltzman brains are very similar to Last Thursdayism.

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