I don’t publish a lot. Also, I’ve tried to fill out this list with numerous examples, but mostly I find people explaining things via anthropics after they were basically inferred from other methods, not people predicting things using this argument from scratch and THEN those things turning out to be true.
The list of “probably successful predictions” that probably started from an anthropic hunch so far was: just Fred Hoyle (but see a sibling comment… maybe Mitchell Porter’s example of Steven Weinberg should count too).
I laughed out loud over the phrasing “Assuming that whales actually exist...”
...and then I wondered if maybe you’re talking about the abstract form of whales in general, and postulating that they might exist (or not) in general in other places. Like perhaps there are something-like-whales under the ice of Europa?
That’s the great thing about roam pages, you don’t have to publish. Draft forever. For instance, here’s a draft applying my conception of anthropics to fish. It’s not finished and maybe it never will be but at least it’s recorded and I can show it to people.
x] I actually didn’t mean that. The concern is that if this is a simulation, it’s unlikely that whales are simulated with much detail, as they don’t have much of an effect on the most probably-interesting-to-simulators aspects of this era. Which I really should have mentioned because that’s one of the branches of the prediction: If we look closely at some whale brains and find that they ought to be huge anthropic measure attractors, there is a way that the underlying theory could still be probable.
I suppose the reason I didn’t mention it is that, if it’s a simulation thing, we have no way of demonstrating that until it’s too late to do anything with that information, and I’m not sure anything good would come of me writing about it any time soon because simulationism is a big pill that most people aren’t eager to swallow.
I don’t publish a lot. Also, I’ve tried to fill out this list with numerous examples, but mostly I find people explaining things via anthropics after they were basically inferred from other methods, not people predicting things using this argument from scratch and THEN those things turning out to be true.
The list of “probably successful predictions” that probably started from an anthropic hunch so far was: just Fred Hoyle (but see a sibling comment… maybe Mitchell Porter’s example of Steven Weinberg should count too).
I laughed out loud over the phrasing “Assuming that whales actually exist...”
...and then I wondered if maybe you’re talking about the abstract form of whales in general, and postulating that they might exist (or not) in general in other places. Like perhaps there are something-like-whales under the ice of Europa?
One fun anthropic-flavored theory (that is definitely not just a retroactive explanation of an idea that is already considered true based on more prosaic reasoning (because we don’t know if it is true yet)) is the proposal by Fergus Simpson that most aliens will turn out to physically larger than us, but from smaller planet-like objects.
That’s the great thing about roam pages, you don’t have to publish. Draft forever. For instance, here’s a draft applying my conception of anthropics to fish. It’s not finished and maybe it never will be but at least it’s recorded and I can show it to people.
x] I actually didn’t mean that. The concern is that if this is a simulation, it’s unlikely that whales are simulated with much detail, as they don’t have much of an effect on the most probably-interesting-to-simulators aspects of this era. Which I really should have mentioned because that’s one of the branches of the prediction: If we look closely at some whale brains and find that they ought to be huge anthropic measure attractors, there is a way that the underlying theory could still be probable.
I suppose the reason I didn’t mention it is that, if it’s a simulation thing, we have no way of demonstrating that until it’s too late to do anything with that information, and I’m not sure anything good would come of me writing about it any time soon because simulationism is a big pill that most people aren’t eager to swallow.