{"items": [{"author": "Arthur", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/616838039502?comment_id=616840359852", "anchor": "fb-616840359852", "service": "fb", "text": "Arguing anything like this from a sample size of 1 is misguided. It's like arguing that it's more likely for intelligent life to have noses than to not have noses because the only intelligent life form we know about has noses.", "timestamp": "1371567818"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/616838039502?comment_id=616840514542", "anchor": "fb-616840514542", "service": "fb", "text": "@Arthur: why is the sample size 1? There were many opportunities for the cold war standoff to escalate into mass destruction.", "timestamp": "1371567914"}, {"author": "BDan", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/616838039502?comment_id=616841387792", "anchor": "fb-616841387792", "service": "fb", "text": "The parties were the same in all cases, though; yes, there were different people in charge at different times, but they all experienced the same influences and had similar expectations of the conflict. In another conflict, the results might have been different. Ultimately, all we really know is that we didn't nuke each other, and we don't have evidence with the vairables set differently enough to be able to say why.", "timestamp": "1371568525"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/616838039502?comment_id=616841627312", "anchor": "fb-616841627312", "service": "fb", "text": "@BDan: \"The parties were the same in all cases\"
But the US and USSR were made up of many individuals, and different cases involved different people. Many were averted through low-level action. An example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov#The_incident", "timestamp": "1371568685"}, {"author": "Danner", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/616838039502?comment_id=616841777012", "anchor": "fb-616841777012", "service": "fb", "text": "It's long, but this is a cool video about the bias: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9R5OWh7luL4
The basic idea is, given enough people, someone will be amazed at their luck.", "timestamp": "1371568792"}, {"author": "Arthur", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/616838039502?comment_id=616842086392", "anchor": "fb-616842086392", "service": "fb", "text": "There are many many things that could've gone differently to make a different person (I could've been born female, born a day later, born with slightly lighter eyes) but here I am.
Other than in the most tautological sense (in which in a deterministic universe the only thing that could happen did happen), it's really silly to therefore claim that my birth is the most likely of all possible events.", "timestamp": "1371568983"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/616838039502?comment_id=616842285992", "anchor": "fb-616842285992", "service": "fb", "text": "@Arthur: I'm confused. It sounds like you're saying we can't use the past to improve our predictions.", "timestamp": "1371569123"}, {"author": "Dustin", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/616838039502?comment_id=616842465632", "anchor": "fb-616842465632", "service": "fb", "text": "I like the idea of a coin demon.", "timestamp": "1371569261"}, {"author": "Benjamin", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/616838039502?comment_id=616842750062", "anchor": "fb-616842750062", "service": "fb", "text": "Funny that you (Arthur) use intelligent life elsewhere as a proxy. The Drake Equation, published in 1961 or thereabouts, is a simple probability argument about the likelihood of extraterrestrial intelligent life: XYZ billion stars in the Milky Way times the likelihood any star has planets, times the likelihood the planets are habitable, etc. More than just astronomy, geology, and biology, several versions of the equation include additional terms, such as the likelihood than any intelligent civilization might destroy itself through nuclear war. Carl Sagan famously made the case that most of these terms lead to relatively good odds of there being intelligent life elsewhere, but that MAD would bottleneck everything.", "timestamp": "1371569561"}, {"author": "Arthur", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/616838039502?comment_id=616842755052", "anchor": "fb-616842755052", "service": "fb", "text": "I'm saying that \"It didn't happen so it can't happen\" is a piss-poor argument especially on a broad historical time scale.
Your weakening of the weak anthropic principle doesn't mean it doesn't apply -- sure, there are timelines in between \"No human life exists anymore at all\" and the world we live in, but most of those timelines are still timelines where we wouldn't be sitting around having this conversation on the Internet. The fact that we are sitting around having this conversation on the Internet doesn't make \"no nuclear war\" a most likely scenario any more than it makes \"The Internet is invented\" a most likely scenario.", "timestamp": "1371569577"}, {"author": "Arthur", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/616838039502?comment_id=616843044472", "anchor": "fb-616843044472", "service": "fb", "text": "I honestly think if we're going the Drake Equation route the most likely outcome for us and for intelligent species similar to us is extinction following biosphere collapse due to the massive resource depletion and pollution caused by the exponentially expanding energy use of technological civilization.
I mean, we could get lucky and dodge that bullet, but if we do so it won't mean that the risk wasn't real or the risk was exaggerated.", "timestamp": "1371569712"}, {"author": "Paul", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/616838039502?comment_id=616843378802", "anchor": "fb-616843378802", "service": "fb", "text": "It's possible to survive a game of Russian Roulette, but that doesn't make a wise decision in retrospect.", "timestamp": "1371569882"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/616838039502?comment_id=616844481592", "anchor": "fb-616844481592", "service": "fb", "text": "@Arthur: \"The fact that we are sitting around having this conversation on the Internet doesn't make 'no nuclear war' a most likely scenario\"
I'm not saying that it does. I'm saying that if we took everything we know about the way the world is, we would estimate some chance of \"failed MAD\" in the future. The simple anthropic argument says we should dramatically increase that estimate based on anthropic concerns, and I'm saying we should increase it somewhat less than that.", "timestamp": "1371570596"}, {"author": "Jim", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/616838039502?comment_id=616860040412", "anchor": "fb-616860040412", "service": "fb", "text": "This anthropic effect potentially interacts with several other anthropic effects, to produce an overall anthropic adjustment that's stronger than just the ratios of the populations. In particular, if the present leads to singularities in the future such that we and our memories are copied N times, and nuclear-war worlds do not lead to such singularities, then there's an interpretation under which we are N times as likely to observe this particular present.
Once you start getting into the trickier anthropic arguments, though, it's a good idea to taboo \"probability\" and switch to talking about \"measure over X\" for some particular X, since anything that obeys Cox's axioms can be called probability, there are several such things, and anthropic arguments cause those things to diverge.", "timestamp": "1371573884"}, {"author": "opted out", "source_link": "#", "anchor": "unknown", "service": "unknown", "text": "this user has requested that their comments not be shown here", "timestamp": "1371574798"}]}