What you are saying reminds me of FNIC—full non-indexical conditioning. It was discussed on LW. It still may have some anthropic effects—like panspermia is more likely, but may be used against DA.
I didn’t explore it in depth but as far as I know FNIC thirds in Sleeping Beauty which I do not find acceptable. Thinking that pamspermia is more likely for no reason also seems quite bad.
However, most facts about my personality are irrelevant to my thought process about anthropic. There was a good term “people in my epistemic situation” used in the SIA-thread here in LW.
I find this “people in my epistemic situation” thing to be pretty unhelpful. Being in a particular epistemic situation is itself may or may not be evidence in favor of particular hypothesis, depending on the setting you are in. We should just be thinking in terms of probability experiments and its causal structure—do the thing we do for every non-anthropic probability theory problem. There is really no need for an extra complication.
another example: I can use my age as random sample of human ages and predict that median human life expectancy based on it. This works despite my ages being subsequent from one to another.
It works as long as the causal process that leads to you selecting the age for the eastimate can be approximated as low probability occurance that can happen at any age and so the sequential nature of age doesn’t matter. On the other hand, if you simply tried to approximate median human age by doing that estimate at every year, then your results would be pretty bad. Most of the estimates would be very off.
For three person in the room—I assume that some amnesia drug removed the knowledge of who exactly I am.
Specify the conditions of the experiment in details then. What information does the participant have? Probability of which event should be estimated?
The case for panspermia seems simpler than Sleeping beauty, as it doesn’t include possible worlds. Imagine that there are two regions of the Universe, in one of which panspermia is possible and in another is not. The one where it is possible has, 100 times more habitable planets per volume. This suggests that we are more likely to be in the region in which panspermia is happening.
On the other hand, if you simply tried to approximate median human age by doing that estimate at every year, then your results would be pretty bad. Most of the estimates would be very off.
Most of the estimates will not be very off. 90 per cent of them will give the correct order of magnitude.
I didn’t explore it in depth but as far as I know FNIC thirds in Sleeping Beauty which I do not find acceptable. Thinking that pamspermia is more likely for no reason also seems quite bad.
I find this “people in my epistemic situation” thing to be pretty unhelpful. Being in a particular epistemic situation is itself may or may not be evidence in favor of particular hypothesis, depending on the setting you are in. We should just be thinking in terms of probability experiments and its causal structure—do the thing we do for every non-anthropic probability theory problem. There is really no need for an extra complication.
It works as long as the causal process that leads to you selecting the age for the eastimate can be approximated as low probability occurance that can happen at any age and so the sequential nature of age doesn’t matter. On the other hand, if you simply tried to approximate median human age by doing that estimate at every year, then your results would be pretty bad. Most of the estimates would be very off.
Specify the conditions of the experiment in details then. What information does the participant have? Probability of which event should be estimated?
The case for panspermia seems simpler than Sleeping beauty, as it doesn’t include possible worlds. Imagine that there are two regions of the Universe, in one of which panspermia is possible and in another is not. The one where it is possible has, 100 times more habitable planets per volume. This suggests that we are more likely to be in the region in which panspermia is happening.
Most of the estimates will not be very off. 90 per cent of them will give the correct order of magnitude.