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Comment by rvcdbn | Hacker News Reader

Why? If the argument works at this point in time when reflecting on our history what makes it stop working for future observers who reflect on their histories?

It can certainly lead you to some pretty wacky-sounding conclusions (looking at you Frank Tipler) but I can’t see why it’s obviously wrong for future observers to deploy it in just the same was as we do.

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No, it's pure bullshit.

You can't apply conditional probabilities to unbias some result if you don't know if the condition holds or not.

You can invent some fiction where some future people apply it. You just can't pretend that there is any realism on it.

So you’re saying that that line of reasoning depends on people existing in the future and thinking about the same kinds of things we do now in the same kinds of ways (at least wrt this particular argument). I can see how that is not guaranteed, especially far into the future where it might become difficult to understand what qualifies as an observer-moment. It is certainly speculative.

It's not speculative. It's completely invalid, and any conclusion you take from it is circular.

I would really love the opportunity to clarify my thinking on this. Is there any way I could ask you to explain it to me in more detail? I can compensate you for your time.

Ah I think I get it. While it might be true that the average (imagined) future observer will have a history which is anthropically biased in this way we cannot use this reasoning to make predictions about which particular future we will find ourselves in (because that’s random according to the usual Born rule probabilities).

Unfortunately it seems like we have hit an impasse. I don’t really understand why you think this is invalid but I would love to be proved wrong. If you would like to continue this discussion over email (or whatever) I’d love that: hn at echophase dot com

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