Unlike Robin Hanson, I am not surprised by who I am. Sure, most things that exist are not alive, are not human and are not statisticians, but that doesn’t make it surprising that I am. What I am is the only thing I could have been.
It’s true that Robin is smarter than most people, and most people don’t write a popular blog. So should he be surprised that he is those things? The only reason he noted those particular features is because those features already exist. The question was generated by the result. Everyone has things about them that are unusual. Should we all be surprised? For example, Brenda might be one of the few left-handed female plumbers in Texas. Should she be surprised? If everyone has unique things they can point to, then shouldn’t that fail to surprise us?
Consider the t-shirt experiment:
20 t-shirts, each a unique color, are placed in a box. You are blindfolded. A shirt is randomly selected from the box and placed on you. You then remove the blindfold.
Suppose you participate in the experiment, and after you remove the blindfold you observe that your t-shirt is blue. Your reaction could be: “I’m surprised to be wearing a blue t-shirt. Only 1 out of 20 shirts was blue.” But of course, you could say the same thing no matter which t-shirt was selected. There was a probability of 1 that a shirt that was unlike the other 19 would be selected. We see the result and then start thinking about how unique that result is.
This kind of reasoning leads to bad inference, such as the self-indication assumption or the doomsday argument. The wikipedia version of the doomsday argument is: “supposing the humans alive today are in a random place in the whole human history timeline, chances are we are about halfway through it.” In other words, if there was a time-traveling stork that selects humans from all humans that will ever exist, and randomly places them at various places in the human history timeline, then we are probably about halfway through human existence. People then debate whether the doomsday conclusion is correct, but do not challenge the assumption that we know is wrong. The doomsday argument can be rejected by simply noting that the assumption is bad (we are not in a random place in the human history timeline).
We shouldn’t be surprised that we exist, since we had to exist to notice that we exist and ask questions about our existence. It would be more surprising if we noticed that we didn’t exist.
I suppose the question then becomes: at what point should we be surprised. How unlikely does and event have to be in order for it to be reasonable to surprise us? I will be somewhat surprised if I notice that I don’t exist, but more surprised that while not existing I’m capable of noticing anything. It would have been somewhat surprising if you had predicted that you’d be wearing the blue shirt… based on a feeling you had and then you were correct unless this sort of thing happened to you often.
actually what I said there didn’t make much sense… how do I un-post this comment?
I can delete it if you want
My kids like to play Yahtzee. I can’t help being distracted by the astronomically unlikely events that occur– such as three people throwing a large straight (5 dice in numerical order) on their first throw, on three consecutive turns. But of course, if you started enumerating every conceivable set of dice throws that was improbable enough to catch your attention… well, right. Not so surprising that once in a while one of these odd things happens. Funny, though, that my kids start joking about the “Yahtzee gods” and what they’re doing to the dice.