On 25 August 2014 10:30, Russell Standish <[email protected]> wrote:
> Attacks on anthropic reasoning will work better by choosing a > reference class which is indisputably a subset of the reference class, > such as all human beings, and then demonstrating a contradiction. I > thought I had come up with such an example with my "Chinese paradox", > but it turned out anthropic reasoning was rescued from that by the > peculiar distribution of country population sizes that happens to hold > in reality. AR has proved remakably resilient to empirical tests. > The Chinese argument shows we shouldn't expect to be in the largest subset of the reference class (at least if it isn't more than 50% of the class, I suppose). Doesn't that also scupper the Doomsday argument, though? Given the number of people who have lived (and assuming only people count as our ref class) we have about 100 billion or so people (I believe?) of whom 6 billion are alive. So how come we're born now, when we have a 94% chance of being born earlier (assuming a population crash as per the DD argument). > > > -- > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) > Principal, High Performance Coders > Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] > University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au > > Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret > (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
