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by notahacker
1847 days ago
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> The fact that this prediction is not 100% accurate when considering Earth's countries does not invalidate the argument. I mean, it does , because he's moved from making general applications of the anthropic principle to very explicit claims about confidence intervals, relationships between variables and shapes of the distributions which don't match even the figures for the part of reality that actually is observable. I'm not just saying "but there are exceptions". I'm saying "given actual human population/landmass distributions, it appears obviously wrong to say that a random person has a 95% probability of living in a country no more than 20% larger than the home country of a randomly selected person from another country, and so a claim the confidence interval is that narrow for planets and alien species is quite extraordinary" (it's moot that much of my own data also works pretty badly for anthropic reasoning, and I'm almost convinced that the applicable version of the anthropic principle for some of those stats is "if an individual is willing and able to make observations about the anthropic principle, the probability they are exposed to Western culture and in the top decile for access to education, cash and free time is ~1" :-) ) |
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You are just refusing to believe statistics has any value. It's just maths, not opinions.
I mean, when we say a fair coin will turn up heads exactly 50% of the time, we mean it in a mathematical way.
Do it 3 times, and you might get 3 tails... based on your argument, the theory should be put into question... but of course it's not how maths works.
Do it 1000 times, and you will see how the normal distribution becomes aparent, with a mean nearly exactly a 0.5. Do it 1 million times, and the mean becomes even more evident... you can keep going on forever, it will ALWAYS become more evident. This is not useless just because it doesn't work after a few times. You can be extremely confident it would work after a large amounts of tries.