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wasoxygen  ·  3601 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Lecture 17: Fun With the Anthropic Principle

I agree, the speaker's intentions affect the result.

    Imagine Steve wants to pose this puzzle.

With this as a given, we are in trouble already. We should probably assume that Steve will choose language that he thinks most likely to lead us to the wrong answer. Consider a casual dialog between office workers:

  "So, do you have any kids?"

  "Yeah, two."

  "Oh? Any boys?"

  "One of them is a boy."
When that last sentence appears outside a puzzle blog or MIT lecture the most reasonable conclusion is that the speaker has one and only one boy.

The question "How long is a day?" has different answers when it is posed by a child, an astronomer, and a puzzler.

The language used in discussing the anthropic principle seems very intentional and motivated, and therefore possibly misleading. Commenter Russ Gorman on another discussion makes what I think is a valid point: the possibilty of never throwing snake-eyes in the Dice Room. This may be a remote chance when there are infinite trials, but not as remote as having an infinite supply of humans to kidnap. I found this discussion when searching for clarification on whether the Dice Room (or Shooting Room) uses selection with replacement, which would clearly affect your odds of survival in the long run.