Our observations are biased because anything that occurs multiple times is very easy to see but something that occurs only once could be completely missed as an essential step towards civilization because we assume it was inevitable.
If something occurred once after long time while it could it seems unlikely.
If something occurred soon after prerequisites were met it seems likely.
If something occurred multiple times independently it seems likely.
1 and 3 seem obviously true. There are multiple trials separated either by geography or time, and they have enough failures / successes to make our intuitions right. Anthropic principle doesn’t get involved here in any way. If agriculture was invented 5 times independently it couldn’t have possibly be the limiting unlikely step.
2 might be luck—something might have been extremely unlikely but just have happened (by anthropic principle). But anthropic principle doesn’t really give any reasons why it should have happened quickly. Of course it’s extremely naive to consider (like Robin’s paper) time as a series of independent trials—maybe it was unlikely as in prerequisites were just in place, and it was either fast or never. That’s why I seriously doubt physics-inspired modeling of such events.
The bias is that we don’t even notice things that occured once. How important is there that we have a moon? That we have a continent that spans east-west? That the K-T impact happened exactly when it did?
There could be a hundred other crucial factors which we never even noticed because nobody thought they were important to the development of civilization.
East-west continent span seems irrelevant, at least for modern civilization, as it was on its way all the way from Upper Paleolithic up to something reasonably civilized in Central America too, independently, up to the point when we broke their isolation.
Our observations are biased because anything that occurs multiple times is very easy to see but something that occurs only once could be completely missed as an essential step towards civilization because we assume it was inevitable.
Where’s the bias?
If something occurred once after long time while it could it seems unlikely.
If something occurred soon after prerequisites were met it seems likely.
If something occurred multiple times independently it seems likely.
1 and 3 seem obviously true. There are multiple trials separated either by geography or time, and they have enough failures / successes to make our intuitions right. Anthropic principle doesn’t get involved here in any way. If agriculture was invented 5 times independently it couldn’t have possibly be the limiting unlikely step.
2 might be luck—something might have been extremely unlikely but just have happened (by anthropic principle). But anthropic principle doesn’t really give any reasons why it should have happened quickly. Of course it’s extremely naive to consider (like Robin’s paper) time as a series of independent trials—maybe it was unlikely as in prerequisites were just in place, and it was either fast or never. That’s why I seriously doubt physics-inspired modeling of such events.
The bias is that we don’t even notice things that occured once. How important is there that we have a moon? That we have a continent that spans east-west? That the K-T impact happened exactly when it did?
There could be a hundred other crucial factors which we never even noticed because nobody thought they were important to the development of civilization.
East-west continent span seems irrelevant, at least for modern civilization, as it was on its way all the way from Upper Paleolithic up to something reasonably civilized in Central America too, independently, up to the point when we broke their isolation.