The Mysteries of Self-Locating Belief and Anthropic Reasoning
نویسنده
چکیده
The limitations of your data collection process affect the inferences you can draw from the data. In the case of the fish-size-estimation problem, a selection effect—the net’s being able to sample only the big fish—invalidates any attempt to extrapolate from the catch to the population remaining in the water. Had your net had a finer mesh, allowing it to sample randomly from all the fish, then finding a hundred fishes all greater than a foot long would have been good evidence that few if any fish remaining were much smaller.
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