Anthropic Bias (Studies in Philosophy) 1st Edition

by Nick Bostrom (Author)

11 ratings

ISBN-13: 978-0415883948

ISBN-10: 0415883946

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Anthropic Bias explores how to reason when you suspect that your evidence is biased by "observation selection effects"--that is, evidence that has been filtered by the precondition that there be some suitably positioned observer to "have" the evidence. This conundrum--sometimes alluded to as "the anthropic principle," "self-locating belief," or "indexical information"--turns out to be a surprisingly perplexing and intellectually stimulating challenge, one abounding with important implications for many areas in science and philosophy.

There are the philosophical thought experiments and paradoxes: the Doomsday Argument; Sleeping Beauty; the Presumptuous Philosopher; Adam & Eve; the Absent-Minded Driver; the Shooting Room.

And there are the applications in contemporary science: cosmology ("How many universes are there?", "Why does the universe appear fine-tuned for life?"); evolutionary theory ("How improbable was the evolution of intelligent life on our planet?"); the problem of time's arrow ("Can it be given a thermodynamic explanation?"); quantum physics ("How can the many-worlds theory be tested?"); game-theory problems with imperfect recall ("How to model them?"); even traffic analysis ("Why is the 'next lane' faster?").

Anthropic Bias argues that the same principles are at work across all these domains. And it offers a synthesis: a mathematically explicit theory of observation selection effects that attempts to meet scientific needs while steering clear of philosophical paradox.

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Editorial Reviews

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"From traffic analysis via a many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and the problem of the fine-tuning of the universe to the purely philosophical problems of the Doomsday argument and the Sleeping Beauty problem, Bostrom succeeds in shining a new and interesting light on all of these issues." --Wouter Meijs

"Bostrom presents a highly readable and widely relevant work which can be warmly recommended to everyone in philosophy of science."--Christian Wuthrich, Philosophy of Science

"Probably the worst thing one can say about this book is that it is too short....Anthropic Bias is a wonderful achievement, which should find place on the shelf of every serious student of modern philosophy of science, epistemology, and cosmology." --Milan Cirkovic, Foundations of Science

"Anthropic Bias is a synthesis of some of the most interesting and important ideas to emerge from discussion of cosmic fine-tuning, the anthropic principle, and the Doomsday Argument. It deserves a place on the shelves of epistemologists and philosophers of science, as well as specialists interested in the topics just mentioned."--Neil Manson, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

About the Author

Nick Bostrom is Swedish-born philosopher and polymath with a background in theoretical physics, computational neuroscience, logic, and artificial intelligence, as well as philosophy. He is Professor at Oxford University, where he leads the Future of Humanity Institute as its founding director. (The FHI is a multidisciplinary university research center; it is also home to the Center for the Governance of Artificial Intelligence and to teams working on AI safety, biosecurity, macrostrategy, and various other technology or foundational questions.) He is the author of some 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias(2002), Global Catastrophic Risks (2008), Human Enhancement (2009), and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), a New York Times bestseller which helped spark a global conversation about artificial intelligence. Bostrom's widely influential work, which traverses philosophy, science, ethics, and technology, has illuminated the links between our present actions and long-term global outcomes, thereby casting a new light on the human condition.

He is recipient of a Eugene R. Gannon Award, and has been listed on Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers list twice. He was included on Prospect's World Thinkers list, the youngest person in the top 15. His writings have been translated into 28 languages, and there have been more than 100 translations and reprints of his works. He is a repeat TED speaker and has done more than 2,000 interviews with television, radio, and print media. As a graduate student he dabbled in stand-up comedy on the London circuit, but he has since reconnected with the doom and gloom of his Swedish roots.

Product details

Item Weight : 12 ounces
Paperback : 244 pages
ISBN-10 : 0415883946
ISBN-13 : 978-0415883948
Product Dimensions : 5.98 x 0.55 x 9.02 inches
Publisher : Routledge; 1st Edition (June 18, 2010)
Language: : English

Best-sellers rank #693,879 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#217 in Epistemology (Books)
#316 in Philosophy Reference (Books)
#721 in Epistemology Philosophy

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kenneth deaton

To best appreciate this tome

Reviewed in the United States on March 21, 2016

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This is a deeply considered discussion of selection theory, which I found helpful, but which I could not always follow. To best appreciate this tome, I recommend having a working knowledge of Bayes Theorem. Dr. Bostrom does his best to explain, but a master's degree in the philosophy of mathematics would be helpful here.

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Chris Nadovich

Rich subject; expert analysis.

Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2020

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Relatively easy to read. Fascinating subject matter.

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Achin

Amazingly Disappointing

Reviewed in the United States on March 26, 2013

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I purchased this with the thought that it would be a great resource for an extended essay concerning selection bias and the nature of both science and philosophy. I was thoroughly disappointed.
Bostrom attempts to demonstrate the invalidity of a multitude of both uses and interpretations of the Anthropic Principle, generally claiming that whomever he is currently proving wrong is incorrect because he (Bostrom) is going to define the words they used differently. In other cases his examples simply make no sense (it is obviously reasonable to assume that actually drawing the shortest straw from a stack of 1,048,576 is due to chance, and not due to rigging of the system).
He seems to have a general lack of actual understanding of the physics he is dealing with, a view easily obtained with but a little background research. The language he employs is overly superfluous (just as that was), and at times he sounds like a preppy school boy showing off the language he just learned for the SAT.
I will admit that Bostrom had some valid points, but the style of writing and his obvious bias (ironically favoring a multitude of authors (Leslie, van Inwagen, etc.)) made it exceedingly difficult for me to read the book in its entirety, resulting in a very premature abortion of the reading.
I believe Bostrom's book is a great example of the effects of selection bias, demonstrating the irrationality that it can lead to and its ability to corrupt even those who are purportedly well-versed in it, and would recommend reading it only to see this phenomena.

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Tim Tyler

A reinventing of the maximum entropy principle

Reviewed in the United States on January 7, 2014

This is the second book on observation selection effects I have read. The first was Barrow and Tipler's book on the topic. The good news is that this book is better than Barrow and Tipler's book was. On the positive side, the book embraces and uses Bayesian statistics, which helps to clarify many of its examples. It is a good example of how to use mathematics helpfully in a popular science book. The book is easy to read and clearly presented. However, I felt that it failed to take some important steps.

The history of the idea of observation selection seems like a bit of a scientific embarrassment. To clarify the field, I think there are some inter-disciplinary links that need to be made. We already have a fairly mature and well-established science of selection - in the form of evolutionary theory. Observation selection is special a case of selection - and so needs to be married with evolutionary theory. Similarly, "survival of the fittest" is a special case of the more general principle of "observation of the observable". Both produce cases of adaptive fitness - goodness of fit between organisms and their environment.

Another relevant link is the maximum entropy principle - which is part of Bayesian statistics. This book presents what it calls the "Self-Sampling Assumption" (S.S.A.) - the idea being that:

"All other things equal, an observer should reason as if they are randomly selected from the set of all actually existent observers (past, present and future) in their reference class."

The "Self-Sampling Assumption" represents the maximum entropy principle applied to observers - in the special case where nothing is known about which member of a set of observers is involved.

The maximum entropy principle neatly covers this case. It also deals with other cases where additional information is available. It also deals with uncertainty concerning other entities besides observers. It is a very general statistical principle.

Rather frustratingly, the book fails to make either link. It argues for the broad applicability of the S.S.A. to scientific topics. However science already has an older, and more broadly-applicable framework which covers this topic - namely the maximum entropy principle. It seems hard to make a case for giving a very limited subset of this principle such a grandiose name.

Another strange thing about the book is its choice of examples. There seemed to be a big emphasis on cosmology and doomsday. I understand these are areas of personal interest to the author - and reflect the history of the topic. While interesting, these examples seem kind-of remote from everyday experience, and are often challenging to understand and test. Since observation selection effects apply to all observations, I thought it was surprising not to have more everyday examples from practical fields - such as medicine and ecology.

The author recognizes that the term "anthropic" is terrible, but he nonetheless puts it in the title of the book. That seems rather disappointing to me.

Overall, while it is great to have a new book about observation selection effects, I felt that there was too much reinventing of the wheel going on here. The S.S.A. is a rechristened and cut-down version of the maximum entropy principle. Since it seems so inferior to the common wisdom in the field, it doesn't seem to deserve the positive treatment it receives in this book.

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Peter McCluskey

Thought-provoking

Reviewed in the United States on March 16, 2005

This book discusses selection effects as they affect reasoning on topics such as the Doomsday Argument, whether you will choose a lane of traffic that is slower than average, and whether we can get evidence for or against the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. Along the way it poses some unusual thought experiments that at first glance seem to prove some absurd conclusions. It then points out the questionable assumptions about what constitute "similar observers" upon which the absurd conclusions depend, and in doing so it convinced me that the Doomsday Argument is weaker than I had previously thought.

It says some interesting things about the implications of a spatially infinite universe, and of the possibility that the number of humans will be infinite.

It is not easy to read, but there's little reason to expect a book on this subject could be both easy to read and correct.

11 people found this helpful

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Thomas Goodey

Too Expensive!

Reviewed in the United States on August 30, 2018

I'd like to purchase this book for Kindle, Nick, but it is ridiculously expensive. Kindle books should be less than $9.99. I bought your 'Superintelligence' and enjoyed it.

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Amazon Customer

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 4, 2015

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Excellent book

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