Saturday, February 16, 2008

Anthropic Principle

I like how Robert Park puts the Anthropic Principle here, which I can never quite get my head around (perhaps because it says little more than this):
If things were different, things wouldn't be the way they are."

1 comment:

MT said...

I've heard of the "strong" and the "weak" anthropic principle, but never Park's "screwy." His articulation, or his paraphrase of somebody else's, is trivial, but I do think there's a there there in decent formulations. The name is too grand for what it is, which I'd say is just about a special kind of selection or sample bias. Rather than an answer to a question, it's more a corrective for the biased questioner. Bias is something that needs pointing out, more or less by definition, and it's common. It's not like a gratuitous cry of "foul" either, since it specifies the bias it's asserting, which is straightforwardly confirmed.