In my opinion, “the next lane goes faster” is not really an anthropic problem. If we treat lane choosing as the experiment, there could be other factors affecting one’s decision other than speed. So one lane could seem more preferable, making it busier thus slower. Or at the very least, as suggested above, joining a lane make it slower.
Nick Bostrom giving an anthropic explanation is not a surprise either. By treating anthropic as Observation Selection Effect, anthropics appear everywhere. Even for a simple toss of a fair coin, we could think how this particular toss is selected from all the tosses performed by me in my lifetime, or even from all the tosses performed by all observers in this universe.
Observation Selection Effect is fixated on reasoning about two things: 1. The fact that I exist (now). 2. The fact that I am this particular physical observer (experiencing the current moment). SSA and SIA try to provide ways to understand them and draw information from them. In my opinion, those things have no explanation. They can only be accepted as primitively given, a reasoning starting point.
Interestingly, if I think about a random coin presented to me, I think about the chances that it is biased coin, and dismiss them as most coins in the universe are not biased and most of observations of coins are observations of unbiased coins. So I use something like selection of my observation from all observations in the universe to get a prior about if the coin is biased. And I do it almost unconsciously, it is built-in calculation of what is normal.
In my opinion, “the next lane goes faster” is not really an anthropic problem. If we treat lane choosing as the experiment, there could be other factors affecting one’s decision other than speed. So one lane could seem more preferable, making it busier thus slower. Or at the very least, as suggested above, joining a lane make it slower.
Nick Bostrom giving an anthropic explanation is not a surprise either. By treating anthropic as Observation Selection Effect, anthropics appear everywhere. Even for a simple toss of a fair coin, we could think how this particular toss is selected from all the tosses performed by me in my lifetime, or even from all the tosses performed by all observers in this universe.
Observation Selection Effect is fixated on reasoning about two things: 1. The fact that I exist (now). 2. The fact that I am this particular physical observer (experiencing the current moment). SSA and SIA try to provide ways to understand them and draw information from them. In my opinion, those things have no explanation. They can only be accepted as primitively given, a reasoning starting point.
Interestingly, if I think about a random coin presented to me, I think about the chances that it is biased coin, and dismiss them as most coins in the universe are not biased and most of observations of coins are observations of unbiased coins. So I use something like selection of my observation from all observations in the universe to get a prior about if the coin is biased. And I do it almost unconsciously, it is built-in calculation of what is normal.