{"id":101,"date":"2006-07-16T03:38:00","date_gmt":"2006-07-16T03:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=101"},"modified":"2006-07-16T03:38:00","modified_gmt":"2006-07-16T03:38:00","slug":"best-anthropicism-contest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=101","title":{"rendered":"Best anthropicism contest"},"content":{"rendered":"

I arrived this morning in Prague for the 2006 Complexity conference<\/a>. Soon I’ll have the photos to prove it. For now, though, I wish to blog neither about the breathtakingly beautiful city in which I find myself, nor about the meaty, succulent topic alluded to in my previous post, but instead about anthropicisms.<\/p>\n

Inspired by Peter Woit’s almost-daily anti-anthropic broadsides<\/a>, and in the spirit of my earlier Best Umeshism Contest<\/a>, I hereby announce a new contest for Best Application of the Anthropic Principle. Here are a few samples to get the self-selected tautological ball rolling, not that it could do otherwise than roll:<\/p>\n

Why do so many people seem to care about being remembered after they die? Because we only remember the ones who cared about being remembered.<\/p>\n

Academics comprise only a tiny portion of humanity, so what are the chances of being an academic as opposed to someone else? Conditioned on asking such a question in the first place, pretty high.<\/p>\n

Why is the moon round? Because if it were square, you wouldn’t be you — you would instead be a being extremely similar to you, except that he or she lives in a universe with a square moon.<\/p>\n

Why am I a blogger? Because if I weren’t, you wouldn’t be reading this.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The rules are similar to the Best Umeshism Contest: up to three entries per person. Please include a name — despite the nature of the contest, “He Who Posted This” doesn’t count. Entries must be in by July 22nd. The winner (as chosen by me) gets to ask any question and have me answer it here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I arrived this morning in Prague for the 2006 Complexity conference. Soon I’ll have the photos to prove it. For now, though, I wish to blog neither about the breathtakingly beautiful city in which I find myself, nor about the meaty, succulent topic alluded to in my previous post, but instead about anthropicisms. Inspired by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contests"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}