In that case, we come to the idea of some kind of “reference class of qualified observers”, which consists of the minds who do think about anthropics or at least can do it.
Or it specifically consists of the minds who think about anthropics in the same confused way that we do.
If most intelligent species continue for a billion years but their anthropic questions are resolved early using something other than SSA, the conditional probability of using SSA to get an incorrect short doomsday timeline is high, because those species that use SSA at all discard it early in their development.
You can take this as anthropic evidence that using SSA as a model is doomed soon.
Agreed. The doom is the end of the reference class, not a bang. And if SSA-based DA is universally refuted so that no one ever even try to think in that direction, then it is the end of this type of thinking. I looked at Google Scholar and found that the number of articles about DA peaked around 2000s and is now declining. It suggests that the interest to the problem is declining.
However, if we will exist for a very long time, there will be a few observers every millennia who still like the SSA and, for billions years, there should be many of them, more than now living SSA-believers. In that case, I am still more likely to find myself in remote future, not now – and as I am not there, I am surprised. Thus DA still predicts bang even if we assume that it will be refuted.
They can generate different dates, but they still use the same mental model which doesn’t depend on the date.
It looks like that I am in the second generation of anthropic reasoning (I started read about it in 2006), but the interesting thing is that the second generation is much more numerous than the first one, thanks to Internet and LW. So it is not surprising to be in the second generation than in the first. But why I am not in the third generation?
Or it specifically consists of the minds who think about anthropics in the same confused way that we do.
If most intelligent species continue for a billion years but their anthropic questions are resolved early using something other than SSA, the conditional probability of using SSA to get an incorrect short doomsday timeline is high, because those species that use SSA at all discard it early in their development.
You can take this as anthropic evidence that using SSA as a model is doomed soon.
Agreed. The doom is the end of the reference class, not a bang. And if SSA-based DA is universally refuted so that no one ever even try to think in that direction, then it is the end of this type of thinking. I looked at Google Scholar and found that the number of articles about DA peaked around 2000s and is now declining. It suggests that the interest to the problem is declining.
However, if we will exist for a very long time, there will be a few observers every millennia who still like the SSA and, for billions years, there should be many of them, more than now living SSA-believers. In that case, I am still more likely to find myself in remote future, not now – and as I am not there, I am surprised. Thus DA still predicts bang even if we assume that it will be refuted.
[edited]
If they keep generating new generations, I should be not in the first generation.
[edited]
They can generate different dates, but they still use the same mental model which doesn’t depend on the date.
It looks like that I am in the second generation of anthropic reasoning (I started read about it in 2006), but the interesting thing is that the second generation is much more numerous than the first one, thanks to Internet and LW. So it is not surprising to be in the second generation than in the first. But why I am not in the third generation?