On Friday, November 23, 2018 at 4:11:26 PM UTC-6, Mason Green wrote: > > Hi everyone, > > I found an interesting blog post that attempts to refute the Doomsday > Argument. It suggests that different worlds ought to be weighted by the > number of people in them, so that you should be more likely to find > yourself in a world where there will be many humans, as opposed to just a > few. This would cancel out the unlikeliness of finding yourself among the > first humans in such a world. > > I’m curious as to what the contributors here think. (I’m new here, I found > out about this list through Russell’s Theory of Nothing book). > > https://risingentropy.com/2018/09/06/adam-and-eves-anthropic-superpowers/ > > -Mason
Without examining the theoretical details of this (or any) probabilistic argument (including Bayesian ones), one general approach is this: The theory may all be correct of course (given accepted assumptions), but it's ultimately convincing when results are compared to Monte Carlo computer experiments. (If you don't like don't "trust" your software's random numbers, then you can get some from [ https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/secure_generate.html ]). Say in the case of "In front of you is a jar. This jar contains either 10 balls or 100 balls. The balls are numbered in order from 1 to either 10 or 100." Then you you write a program that randomly creates either a 10ball-jar with probability 0.50 (or any p) or a 100ball-jar with probability 0.50 (or 1-p) and then pick a ball at random. You run this 10,000 times (or whatever) and just get statistics. You can do this for the Monte Hall problem - which has the irony that Monte Carlo "solves" the Monte Hall problem! - pt -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
