Your ‘if’ statements made me update. I guess there is also a distinction between what conclusions one can draw from this type of anthropic reasoning.
One (maybe naive?) conclusion is that ‘the anthropic principle is protecting us’. If you think the anthropic principle is relevant, then you continue to expect it to allow you to evade extinction.
The other conclusion is that ‘the anthropic perspective is relevant to our past but not our future’. You consider anthropics to be a source of distortion on the historical record, but not a guide to what will happen next. Under this interpretation you would anticipate extinction of [humans / you / other reference class] to be more likely in the future than in the past.
I suspect this split depends on whether you weight your future timelines by how many observers are in them, etc.
Your ‘if’ statements made me update. I guess there is also a distinction between what conclusions one can draw from this type of anthropic reasoning.
One (maybe naive?) conclusion is that ‘the anthropic principle is protecting us’. If you think the anthropic principle is relevant, then you continue to expect it to allow you to evade extinction.
The other conclusion is that ‘the anthropic perspective is relevant to our past but not our future’. You consider anthropics to be a source of distortion on the historical record, but not a guide to what will happen next. Under this interpretation you would anticipate extinction of [humans / you / other reference class] to be more likely in the future than in the past.
I suspect this split depends on whether you weight your future timelines by how many observers are in them, etc.