Re: Sabine Hossenfleder reports on a study that finds that the universe is not fine tuned for life

On Sun, 24 Nov 2024 21:40:45 +0000, John Harshman wrote:

On 11/24/24 8:44 AM, Ernest Major wrote:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXzV7zdl4oU

>
Interesting paper, but I find her delivery annoying. It seems that we're
supposed to like a scientific result to the extent that it argues
against a theory she dislikes for unexplained reasons. And why does a
lack of fine-tuning argue against a multiverse anyway?

I watched her video on my own prior to seeing this and my thought
was that she first complained about a rather dumb reworking of
the Anthropic Principle that leveraged a fine tuning argument,
then turned that on its head with a paper that argued the
Cosmological Constant is within a range of workable values
but apparently not the "optimal" value to somehow do something
like affirm the consequent to not only say this means we're
not fine tuned but that therefore the hypothesis of a multiverse
is false.
It's hard to unpack all the ways the argument was wrong.
The whole "fine tuned" bit isn't such a good claim to begin with
but "not fine tuned" because not optimal in a modeling exercise
is worse. The Multiverse thing isn't a workaround to the fine
tuning argument but a consequence of other things. And the Anthropic
Principle is being granted much more significance than a simple
definition of it seems to merit.