<story><title>Why this universe? New calculation suggests our cosmos is typical</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-this-universe-new-calculation-suggests-our-cosmos-is-typical-20221117/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>layer8</author><text>If you have two competing theories, one requiring fine-tuned parameters and the other not, then the latter seems more plausible, because it requires less assumptions. Our universe being “typical” in the context of some theory just means that it requires less fine-tuning, and therefore the theory arguably has more merit.</text></item><item><author>_Algernon_</author><text>Seems silly to try to calculate probabilities from a sample size of 1, but what do I know.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zwkrt</author><text>But the problem is that we have no evidence to suggest that our universe is typical in the first place. For all we know there are a trillion trillion universes and ours is the only one with gravity by some fluke, and we are actually living in the least likely possible universe.&lt;p&gt;And that&amp;#x27;s the issue is this model is trying to &amp;#x27;work backward&amp;#x27; and justify our universe and it&amp;#x27;s constants as being mathematically harmonious and &amp;#x27;typical&amp;#x27; without having any understanding of what the actual value of &amp;#x27;typical&amp;#x27; is.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why this universe? New calculation suggests our cosmos is typical</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-this-universe-new-calculation-suggests-our-cosmos-is-typical-20221117/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>layer8</author><text>If you have two competing theories, one requiring fine-tuned parameters and the other not, then the latter seems more plausible, because it requires less assumptions. Our universe being “typical” in the context of some theory just means that it requires less fine-tuning, and therefore the theory arguably has more merit.</text></item><item><author>_Algernon_</author><text>Seems silly to try to calculate probabilities from a sample size of 1, but what do I know.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_Algernon_</author><text>How do you know that the parameters are fine tuned from a single observation? Occam&amp;#x27;s razor still needs multiple observations to create the model.</text></comment>