On 11/24/2018 1:53 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:
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/
<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!
The best intuition pump to solve the Monte Hall problem is to imagine
that there are 100 doors and Monte opens all the doors except the one
you chose and one other....do you switch?
Brent
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