Anthropic shadow

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Pablo (+31/-25) 'global catastrophe' is correct: it says 'when attempts', so doesn't imply it applies to all global catastrophes
MichaelA (+14/-9) changed global to existential catastrophe, since the former wouldn't necessarily destroy all observers or prevent re-emergence
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Anthropic shadow is the phenomenon involved when attempts to estimate the probabilitymagnitude of a global catastrophecatastrophic or existential risk are biased by the fact that they are implicitly conditioning on the existence of human observers.

Further reading

Ćirković, Milan M., Anders Sandberg & Nick Bostrom (2010) Anthropic shadow: observation selection effects and human extinction risks, Risk Analysis, vol. 30, pp. 1495–1506.

Milan Ćirković, Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom have developed a model to quantify and correct for this effect (Ćirković, Sandberg & Bostrom 2010).effect.[1]

BibliographyRelated entries

anthropics | estimation of existential risk | existential risk | global catastrophic risk

  1. ^

    Ćirković, Milan M., Anders Sandberg & Nick Bostrom (2010) Anthropic shadow: observation selection effects and human extinction risks, Risk Analysis, vol. 30, pp. 1495–1506.

    Related entries

    anthropics | estimation of existential risk | existential risk | global catastrophic risk

Anthropic shadow is the phenomenon involved when attempts to estimate the probability of an existentiala global catastrophe are biased by the fact that they are implicitly conditioning on the existence of human observers.

An event severe enough to destroy all present observers and prevent the emergence of any future observers will necessarily leave no observable traces of its past existence. Such an anthropic effect will bias any attempt to estimate existentialthe risk of human extinction based on observed frequencies, causing an underestimation of actual risk.

Milan Ćirković, Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom have developed a model to understandquantify and correct for this effect (Ćirković, Sandberg & Bostrom 2010).

Milan Ćirković, Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom have developed a model to understand and correct for this effect (Ćirković, Sandberg & Bostrom 2010).

An event severe enough to destroysdestroy all present observers and prevent the emergence of any future observers will necessarily leave no observable traces of its past existence. Such an anthropic effect will bias any attempt to estimate existential risk based on observed frequencies, causing an underestimation of actual risk.

AAn event severe enough global catastrophe thatto destroys all present observers and preventsprevent the emergence of any future observers will necessarily leave no observable traces of its past existence. Such an anthropic effect will bias any attempt to estimate existential risk based on observed frequencies, causing an underestimation of actual risk.

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