Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy

330 citations recorded by the source corpus.

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

Existential risks: analyzing human extinction scenarios and related hazards (2002, unknown): “But maybe that we should be more primitive humans than we are? In order to answer this question, we need a solution to the problem of the reference class in observer selection theory [76].”
Varying Constants, Gravitation and Cosmology (2010, background): “This structure needs not be fine-tuned and shall be sufficiently large and variegated so that it can contain as a proper part a universe like the one we observe the fine-tuning of which is then explained by an observation selection effect [62].”
Dimensionless constants, cosmology and other dark matters (2005, background): “As discussed extensively elsewhere [9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22], there are four common responses to this realization:”
Issues in the Philosophy of Cosmology (2006, background): “They provide a way of applying probability to the universe [193, 17] (because they deny the uniqueness of the universe).”
What does inflation really predict? (2004, background): “Instead, we can think of distributions like those in figures 7 and 8 as the raw probability distributions that come out of inflation, to be modulated by conditioning on whatever is appropriate to condition on [46, 47].”