Monday, June 06, 2005

Anthropic Principle vs Survivorship Bias

Anthropic Principle: Life on Earth is the result of a magnificent set of highly-tuned parameters.

Motivation for the Survivorship Bias: A scammer sends out 8000 emails making a prediction on the rise of a stock, 4000 for up, 4000 for down. The following week, he sends 2000 ups and 2000 downs to the folks who received the correct prediction in the previous mailing. After six weeks, he's got 250 people who've seen him make 6 correct predictions in a row and are ready to give him some money to invest.

Seen from one perspective, the guy seems like a genius. Viewed with the full set of facts in hand, he turns out not to be so spectacular, and the winner, while lucky, is not special in any predestined fashion.

If there are an infinite number of universes popping in and out of existence, all with variations of the "finely tuned parameters", we just happen to be this kind of winner. The lucky kind.

Of course it would be nice not to get sick or tired or hurt or hungry...

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Dennett approaches this from a strictly logical viewpoint; The fact that we know about the special conditions for life means that the special conditions are indeed in place; it does not, however mean that they MUST be in place. Were they not, we wouldn't be here, and that, on the whole, is more likely.

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