I think the application to the Hero With A Thousand Chances is partly incorrect because of a technicality. Consider the following hypothesis: there is a huge number of “parallel worlds” (not Everett branches, just thinking of different planets very far away is enough) each fighting the Dust. Every fight each of those worlds summons a randomly selected hero. Today that hero happened to be you. The world that happened to summon you has survived the encounter with the Dust 1079 times before you. The world next to it has already survived 2181, and the other one was destroyed during the 129th attempt.
This hypothesis explains the observation of the hero pretty well—you can’t get summoned to a world that’s destroyed or has successfully eliminated the Dust, so of course you get summoned to a world that is still fighting. As for the 1079 attempts before you, you can’t consider that a lot of evidence for fighting the Dust being easy, maybe you’re just 1080th entry in their database and can only be summoned for the 1080th attempt, there was no way for you to observe anything else. Under this hypothesis, you personally still have a pretty high chance of dying—there’s no angel helping you, that specific world really did get very lucky, as did lots of other worlds.
So, anthropic angel/”we’re in a fanfic” hypothesis explains observations just as well as this “many worlds, and you’re 1079th on their database” hypothesis, so they’re updated by the same amount, and at least for me the “many worlds” hypothesis has much higher prior than “I’m a fanfic character” hypothesis.
Note, this only holds from hero’s perspective: from Aerhien’s POV she really has observed herself survive 1079 times, which counts as a lot of evidence for the anthropic angel.
Yeah, the hero with a thousand chances is a bit weird since you and Aerhien should technically have different priors. I didn’t want to get too much into it since it’s pretty complicated, but technically you can have hypotheses where bad things only start happening after the council summons you.
This has weird implications for the cold war case. Technically I can’t reflect against the cold war anthropic shadow since it was before I was born. But a hypothesis where things changed when I was born seems highly unnatural and against the Copernican principle.
In your example though, the hypothesis that things are happening normally is still pretty bad to other hypotheses we can imagine. That’s because there will be a much larger number of worlds that are in a more sensible stalemate with the Dust, instead of “incredibly improbable stuff happens all the time”. Like even “the hero defeats the Dust normally each time” seems more likely. The less things that need to go right, the more survivors there are! So in your example, it is still a more likely hypothesis that there is some mysterious Counter-Force that just seems like it is a bunch of random coincides, and this would be a type of anthropic angel.
I think the application to the Hero With A Thousand Chances is partly incorrect because of a technicality. Consider the following hypothesis: there is a huge number of “parallel worlds” (not Everett branches, just thinking of different planets very far away is enough) each fighting the Dust. Every fight each of those worlds summons a randomly selected hero. Today that hero happened to be you. The world that happened to summon you has survived the encounter with the Dust 1079 times before you. The world next to it has already survived 2181, and the other one was destroyed during the 129th attempt.
This hypothesis explains the observation of the hero pretty well—you can’t get summoned to a world that’s destroyed or has successfully eliminated the Dust, so of course you get summoned to a world that is still fighting. As for the 1079 attempts before you, you can’t consider that a lot of evidence for fighting the Dust being easy, maybe you’re just 1080th entry in their database and can only be summoned for the 1080th attempt, there was no way for you to observe anything else. Under this hypothesis, you personally still have a pretty high chance of dying—there’s no angel helping you, that specific world really did get very lucky, as did lots of other worlds.
So, anthropic angel/”we’re in a fanfic” hypothesis explains observations just as well as this “many worlds, and you’re 1079th on their database” hypothesis, so they’re updated by the same amount, and at least for me the “many worlds” hypothesis has much higher prior than “I’m a fanfic character” hypothesis.
Note, this only holds from hero’s perspective: from Aerhien’s POV she really has observed herself survive 1079 times, which counts as a lot of evidence for the anthropic angel.
Yeah, the hero with a thousand chances is a bit weird since you and Aerhien should technically have different priors. I didn’t want to get too much into it since it’s pretty complicated, but technically you can have hypotheses where bad things only start happening after the council summons you.
This has weird implications for the cold war case. Technically I can’t reflect against the cold war anthropic shadow since it was before I was born. But a hypothesis where things changed when I was born seems highly unnatural and against the Copernican principle.
In your example though, the hypothesis that things are happening normally is still pretty bad to other hypotheses we can imagine. That’s because there will be a much larger number of worlds that are in a more sensible stalemate with the Dust, instead of “incredibly improbable stuff happens all the time”. Like even “the hero defeats the Dust normally each time” seems more likely. The less things that need to go right, the more survivors there are! So in your example, it is still a more likely hypothesis that there is some mysterious Counter-Force that just seems like it is a bunch of random coincides, and this would be a type of anthropic angel.