I'm diving into a full semester this year with some of my most anticipated computer science classes all falling in at the same time: I'm enrolled in Statistics, Computer Graphics, Parallel Processing, Algorithms, and Bioinformatics.
I had an "aha" moment today while thinking about a principle we learned in statistics called the Simple Random Sample. The SRS is just what you would expect it to be: in order to find a "representative" sample of things within a larger set of those things, you need to randomly choose them, i.e. you can't bias the choices or accidentally prefer things by, say, using the "lazy method" and picking the 10 closest tires when you walk into a roomful of stacks of tires. If you did, it wouldn't be a random sample. The principle is based on this idea: in order for a random sample to be representative, every one of the things in the full set has to have an equal chance of being chosen for the "sample" set.
Isn't that interesting? As human beings, we rely heavily on our "intuitive" statistical sense of things. This is absolutely necessary because we have to try to make sense of a broad world from a small subset of its information. In other words, we almost always deal with "sample" data on a day-to-day basis and we have to hope that it is representative. For example, when walking down the street or in a park, we anticipate that people will generally not strike out at us or try to hurt us. This intuition is based on our previous experiences indicating that most people just don't do that. Whew, thank goodness! :)
Ok, so now to get to the point... if our world is based largely on a need to find representative data, and if "representative" is, by definition, "having an equal chance of being chosen" from the full set of things, then might this be the source of anthropic justice? We want the world to be "fair" and "just" so that our random sample is representative in order for our data to be highly predictive. Justice leads to greater efficiency to individuals and groups because of the predictive improvements available in a just society (not to mention many other benefits).
I wonder if this hypothesis is testable...
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