A recent wave of philosophers and physicists (and people combining the two categories) has been examining the self-sampling assumption, which is a generalization of the principle of the Casanova bias to our own existence. Consider our own fates. Some people reason that the odds of any of us being in existence are so low that our being here cannot be attributed to an accident of fate. Think of the odds of the parameters being exactly where they need to be to induce our existence (any deviation from the optimal calibration would have made our world explode, collapse, or simply not come into
...more
