Anthropic reasoning without duplicates is just standard Bayesian updating

Philosopher Stuart Armstrong is arguing on LessWrong that anthropic reasoning—the math of thinking about your own existence—is simpler than most people believe. In situations where there's only one copy of you, Armstrong says the reasoning works exactly like standard Bayesian statistics. The insight matters for questions like this: if humanity survived the Cold War, did we get lucky, or was it less dangerous than we feared? Armstrong's conclusion: the truly strange parts of anthropic reasoning come from the assumptions you start with, not the math itself.

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