(You can skip to the "Refuting the Doomsday Argument section")
This one's even more subtle: There are many cases we can look at where the SIA makes perfect sense and holds mathematically. But I think some people try to over-generalize it. When asking anthropic questions, it seems extremely easy to make mistakes when setting up your assumptions - for instance, the orphanages examples.
(This won't make sense until you've read the post, but: There's the variation where one orphanage is known to be fake and the other real. There's another variation where one is known to have been all-boys and the other all-girls, and John is a male. I made the mistake in believing these variants are analogous, but they're not!! In an exchange with Joseph Rahi in the comments, I actually ended up arguing incorrectly against the SIA for a while.)
I think one intuition that may help is this: Observer selection effects are real, they're just a matter of treating observers like you would any other probabilistic object. As far as I'm aware, any example with conscious observers has an equivalent with objects. For example, swapping orphans to candy made the above difference between variants much more obvious. For another example, you could replace SB with a paper that says "I give Heads an X% chance". How do you decide how "correct" that paper was? How you count determines whether the Halver or Thirder strategy is better, and neither requires the idea of anything new being learned by the piece of paper after the experiment begins.
I got like 2k words into a blog post about whether or not “hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, etc…” based on our Twitter argument.
But unfortunately I don’t have a 30 day blogging residency to finish it… maybe after Manifest DC I’ll have the time to complete it 😭
> I disagree with the second criticism/think it’s not meaningful. If we’re considering cost-effectiveness for our epistemic tools2, it’s very easy for a proper subset to be more valuable than the loose category it’s drawn from
I agree with your point about distinguishing subsets! But my real point is more something like, cultural evolution isn't really a thing as distinct from its mechanisms. If we want to consider it as its own thing, we have to consider all the mechanisms that comprise it, which is why I ranked it mid-tier in my 2nd list.
We have to do this because there isn't really anything "left" if we remove the mechanisms, unlike in your example of philosophy (when you take out the sciences from it, there's still some core we call philosophy that is certainly less valuable than the "full" field of philosophy including all the sciences it spawned). The way you describe cultural evolution in your original post seems approximately coterminous with one of its mechanisms, folk wisdom, rather than some pure core of cultural evolution.
Actually, I decided to spend more time on this, and I think now I've got a *proof* against the SIA reasoning for the SB problem. Or maybe not a proof, but a 5-step transformation which I think basically acts as a proof unless you disagree with any of the steps.
(I'm assuming that the SIA argument for 1/3 position in SB is exactly analogous to this problem with God creating people in rooms, and that's the version I focus on in the "proof":
Thanks for the shoutout!
I actually never understood the idea that with the SIA, upon waking, SB learns new information.
However, I do tackle the SIA directly here:
https://ramblingafter.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the
(You can skip to the "Refuting the Doomsday Argument section")
This one's even more subtle: There are many cases we can look at where the SIA makes perfect sense and holds mathematically. But I think some people try to over-generalize it. When asking anthropic questions, it seems extremely easy to make mistakes when setting up your assumptions - for instance, the orphanages examples.
(This won't make sense until you've read the post, but: There's the variation where one orphanage is known to be fake and the other real. There's another variation where one is known to have been all-boys and the other all-girls, and John is a male. I made the mistake in believing these variants are analogous, but they're not!! In an exchange with Joseph Rahi in the comments, I actually ended up arguing incorrectly against the SIA for a while.)
I think one intuition that may help is this: Observer selection effects are real, they're just a matter of treating observers like you would any other probabilistic object. As far as I'm aware, any example with conscious observers has an equivalent with objects. For example, swapping orphans to candy made the above difference between variants much more obvious. For another example, you could replace SB with a paper that says "I give Heads an X% chance". How do you decide how "correct" that paper was? How you count determines whether the Halver or Thirder strategy is better, and neither requires the idea of anything new being learned by the piece of paper after the experiment begins.
I got like 2k words into a blog post about whether or not “hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, etc…” based on our Twitter argument.
But unfortunately I don’t have a 30 day blogging residency to finish it… maybe after Manifest DC I’ll have the time to complete it 😭
Exciting!
your writing is so unnervingly beautiful that I have an irresistible urge to sleep with you.
Feel free to send my articles to your women friends or relatives!
🫡
> I disagree with the second criticism/think it’s not meaningful. If we’re considering cost-effectiveness for our epistemic tools2, it’s very easy for a proper subset to be more valuable than the loose category it’s drawn from
I agree with your point about distinguishing subsets! But my real point is more something like, cultural evolution isn't really a thing as distinct from its mechanisms. If we want to consider it as its own thing, we have to consider all the mechanisms that comprise it, which is why I ranked it mid-tier in my 2nd list.
We have to do this because there isn't really anything "left" if we remove the mechanisms, unlike in your example of philosophy (when you take out the sciences from it, there's still some core we call philosophy that is certainly less valuable than the "full" field of philosophy including all the sciences it spawned). The way you describe cultural evolution in your original post seems approximately coterminous with one of its mechanisms, folk wisdom, rather than some pure core of cultural evolution.
Anyway great post!
Actually, I decided to spend more time on this, and I think now I've got a *proof* against the SIA reasoning for the SB problem. Or maybe not a proof, but a 5-step transformation which I think basically acts as a proof unless you disagree with any of the steps.
(I'm assuming that the SIA argument for 1/3 position in SB is exactly analogous to this problem with God creating people in rooms, and that's the version I focus on in the "proof":
https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-guide-to-the-anthropic?r=1ml1p0&selection=f5d119b9-e46d-4579-b0bc-6dc0f3641bcf&utm_campaign=post-share-selection
)
Let me know if you're interested!