Anthropic Bias (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Anthropic Bias (2020)

anthropic-principle.com

63 pointsatulvi12 comments

This is a link to a 240 page book without any further context. Hard to have a discussion on something like that, since most people not already familiar with this book would have a hard time writing a meaningful comment about it.

For things like this, it would be neat to institute a “HN Book Club,” where readers informally schedule a (bi)weekly discussion on each chapter. I think that would help keep the discussion focused and easier to approach.

Discussion can be good, but I sometimes find that I'm happy to see no comments under something that is just of interest and doesn't really require comment.

I am not convinced the universe actually is that well tuned for intelligent life. There are quite a few problems I experience on a daily basis.

Speed of light is too slow, making communication difficult.

Reactionless thrusters seem to be impossible, making travel slow and noisy.

Over unity power generation impossible, making power expensive.

Over unity power generation could result in some planet-destroying runaway accidents. Maybe we're better off without that one.

I guess the comment is in jest but the argument is that it's finetunned for life to be possible not comfortable.

By definition, within Earth's evolutionary history, we are about the dumbest possible animals to achieve sapience. Perhaps similarly, our universe is one of the dumbest possible configurations to support our kind of life?

The universe is obviously not tuned for space faring intelligent life. What the Anthropic Principle or Self-Sampling Assumption actually says is the universe is tuned to include our form of intelligent life, maybe others too, but not necessarily all forms of intelligent life. I haven't read the book, but basically we could not observe a universe that was not tuned for us, so it should not surprise us to see that it is.

Not (2020), (2002):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_Bias_(book)

This digital copy of the book was released in February 2020

The print edition is available at AbeBooks for about $50. The publication date is listed as 2010, FWIW.

https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?cm_sp=SearchF...

Nick Bostrom, the author, also wrote "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" [1], which HN readers may be more familiar with. If you enjoyed that book, I would highly recommend this one as well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dang...

Another related view on this, especially Chapter 6, is Chapter 18 of Scott Aaronson's "Quantum Computing since Democritus" [1], that discusses some interesting stuff you can do with SSA.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Computing_Since_Democr...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com