From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Thu Mar 27 2003 - 19:04:30 MST
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael M. Butler [mailto:mmb@spies.com]
> Sent: Friday, 28 March 2003 10:18
> To: extropians@extropy.org
> Subject: Anthropoid objections [semi-long], was Re: anthropic
> reasoning
>
>
> [Bleak downcast confession: I run the risk of treading old
> familiar ground
> to the Bayesians here, but it's either that or dredging for
> W*R news, and
> for the moment I choose the former. Bayes, forgive me, for I
> have sinned.]
>
> On Thu, 27 Mar 2003 23:22:34 +0100, scerir <scerir@libero.it> wrote:
>
> > Thus anthropic reasoning predicts that we should
> > find ourselves in such a large civilization, while in fact
> we do not.
> > There
> > must be an important flaw in our understanding of the
> structure of the
> > universe and the range of development of civilizations, or
> in the process
> > of
> > anthropic reasoning.
Yes, there is a flaw in the process of anthropic reasoning. The Anthropic
Principle says so! We cannot derive any probabilities about the likelihood
of our existence based on the fact that we exist; no matter how unlikely &
uncommon it is for life to develop, we are it, and wont know any different.
It's elementary stuff.
> This bugs me, and statements of this sort have always bugged
> me. I think
> I'm wary of it as a possible misapplication of what is often
> called "the
> law of large numbers".
>
> It seems to me that saying things like "we should" rather
> than something
> more like "out of /x/ trials, a civilization was seen in /y/ cases to
> possess property /w/, with a variation /z/ across trial sets,
> suggesting
> probability P" is a huge palming-of-a-card, possibly itself
> in a quasi-
> anthropic way. Akin to the claim (a loaded one, but easy to
> come by) that
> because x-ethnicity is usually in jail, I "ought to be" in
> jail because I
> am x-ethnicity.
By the same thinking, we should all be third worlders, because they are the
vast majority of the population of the planet. But we aren't, because we are
damned lucky SOBs. Each of us only rolls the dice once, not 6 billion times;
we can beat the house. Same for entire species, and entire worlds.
Emlyn
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