If within two generations we could stabilize the anthropic reasoner population at around 35 (say 10 enforcing, 25 to account for enforcement failure) with life spans averaging 100 years that would put us in the final 95% …
That sounds like something Evidential Decision Theory would do, but not Timeless or Updateless Decision Theories. Unless you think that reaching a certain number of anthropic reasoners would cause human extinction.
Hmmm. Yes thats right, as far as I understand those theories at least. I guess my point is that something seems very wrong with an argument that makes predictions but offers nothing in the way of causal regularities whose variables could in principle be manipulated to alter the result. It isn’t even like seen barometer indicate low pressure and then predicting a storm (while not understanding the variable that lead to the correlation of barometers indicating low pressure and storms coming): there isn’t even any causal knowledge involved in the Doomsday argument afaict. Note that this isn’t the case with all anthropic reasoning, it is peculiar to this argument. The only way we know of predicting the future is by knowing earlier conditions and rules governing those conditions over time: the Doomsday argument is thus an entirely knew way of making predictions. This suggests to me something has to be wrong with it.
Maybe the self-indication assumption is the way out, I can’t tell if I would have the same problem with it.
That sounds like something Evidential Decision Theory would do, but not Timeless or Updateless Decision Theories. Unless you think that reaching a certain number of anthropic reasoners would cause human extinction.
Hmmm. Yes thats right, as far as I understand those theories at least. I guess my point is that something seems very wrong with an argument that makes predictions but offers nothing in the way of causal regularities whose variables could in principle be manipulated to alter the result. It isn’t even like seen barometer indicate low pressure and then predicting a storm (while not understanding the variable that lead to the correlation of barometers indicating low pressure and storms coming): there isn’t even any causal knowledge involved in the Doomsday argument afaict. Note that this isn’t the case with all anthropic reasoning, it is peculiar to this argument. The only way we know of predicting the future is by knowing earlier conditions and rules governing those conditions over time: the Doomsday argument is thus an entirely knew way of making predictions. This suggests to me something has to be wrong with it.
Maybe the self-indication assumption is the way out, I can’t tell if I would have the same problem with it.