This makes sense to me, but my ratings would be very different from yours. Also, is your rating for Western Europe 1900 colored by hindsight of two world wars, viral encephalitis, spanish flu and the rise to domination of the bureaucratic state? How clear are you being about socio-economic class? Are we just assuming the population distributions that existed? If so, ancient world slavery might make it less appealing than the Paleolithic I think. As noted, time travel is problematic, but in what sense could a Paleolithic person ‘be’ me.
Also, is your rating for Western Europe 1900 colored by hindsight of two world wars, viral encephalitis, spanish flu and the rise to domination of the bureaucratic state?
Definitely not, I estimate that in most parallel universes such things didn’t happen. They’re very low likelihood was very strong expert consensus of the time, and we really don’t have any new knowledge leading us to believe that they were likely.
Well they’re at least more likely then our priors for them… they happened. Even with only a tiny prior that a coin is heads-biased, it landing heads is evidence for it.
You’re privileging a hypothesis of events that happened. It was never 50% current world:50% something else—then add the fact that current world happened, and we’re over 50% line.
Plenty of things which have happened had negligibly low probabilities.
This makes sense to me, but my ratings would be very different from yours. Also, is your rating for Western Europe 1900 colored by hindsight of two world wars, viral encephalitis, spanish flu and the rise to domination of the bureaucratic state? How clear are you being about socio-economic class? Are we just assuming the population distributions that existed? If so, ancient world slavery might make it less appealing than the Paleolithic I think.
As noted, time travel is problematic, but in what sense could a Paleolithic person ‘be’ me.
Definitely not, I estimate that in most parallel universes such things didn’t happen. They’re very low likelihood was very strong expert consensus of the time, and we really don’t have any new knowledge leading us to believe that they were likely.
Well they’re at least more likely then our priors for them… they happened. Even with only a tiny prior that a coin is heads-biased, it landing heads is evidence for it.
You’re privileging a hypothesis of events that happened. It was never 50% current world:50% something else—then add the fact that current world happened, and we’re over 50% line.
Plenty of things which have happened had negligibly low probabilities.