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Notes -
I think the anthropic principle is fine for pointing out why we don't see things with bimodal outcomes of "everything is fine" / "everyone is dead".
But nuclear and biological weapons don't look like that. If 5% of worlds have no nuclear war, 40% have one that killed half the population, and the other 55% have one that wipes out everyone, 80% of observers should be in the "half of the population died in a nuclear war" worlds.
Which means one of the following:
Nuclear war will generally kill everyone in pretty short order (and thus by the anthropic principle most observers are in worlds where nuclear war has never started)
We're quite lucky even taking the anthropic principle into account: most observers are in more disastrous worlds than us
Nuclear war isn't actually very likely: most observers are in worlds where it never gets started
Something else weird is going on (e.g. simulation hypothesis is correct).
Hypothesis 1 seems unlikely to me since the models I've seen of even a full counter-value exchange don't seem to kill more than half the people in the world. Hypothesis 3 seems like the sort of world that does not contain the Cuban missile crisis, Petrov, the Norwegian rocket incident.
Which leaves us with the conclusion that either hypothesis 2 is correct and we're just lucky in a way that is not accounted for by the anthropic principle, or our world model has a giant gaping hole in it.
I think it's probably the "giant gaping hole" one. And so any doomer explanation that also would have predicted nuclear (or biological) doom has this hole. And it's that point I would like to see the doomers engage with.
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