Since you conclude that both SIA and SSA are flawed because we know a lot about our parents, let’s see if that works. Imagine a world where people spend their first years not knowing much about their parents, or about human reproduction. Suppose they each live in a kind of egg, and receive newscasts from outside only carrying information about the particular anthropic problem we want them to solve (e.g. “the world currently contains N people”, or “there are two theories about astronomy” and so on). How should people solve anthropic problems under such conditions? Should they use SIA or SSA? Or should they still reject both, but based on some other argument, and the “we know a lot about our parents” argument was a red herring?
How should people solve anthropic problems under such conditions
This is probably a good situation to abstain from judgement all together. But if we really want some number, just for the sake of it, then adopting equiprobable prior between SSA, SIA and No Randomness seems to be pretty decent. Or confidence interval wide enough so that all the three estimates fit into it. This is not going to be a particularly helpful estimate, but what else did you expect from reasoning based on your own ignorance?
Since you conclude that both SIA and SSA are flawed because we know a lot about our parents, let’s see if that works. Imagine a world where people spend their first years not knowing much about their parents, or about human reproduction. Suppose they each live in a kind of egg, and receive newscasts from outside only carrying information about the particular anthropic problem we want them to solve (e.g. “the world currently contains N people”, or “there are two theories about astronomy” and so on). How should people solve anthropic problems under such conditions? Should they use SIA or SSA? Or should they still reject both, but based on some other argument, and the “we know a lot about our parents” argument was a red herring?
This is probably a good situation to abstain from judgement all together. But if we really want some number, just for the sake of it, then adopting equiprobable prior between SSA, SIA and No Randomness seems to be pretty decent. Or confidence interval wide enough so that all the three estimates fit into it. This is not going to be a particularly helpful estimate, but what else did you expect from reasoning based on your own ignorance?