The key most people miss about the anthropic principle, and that seems to be the confusion here, is that when you're filtering out false hypotheses (those incon

The key most people miss about the anthropic principle, and that seems to be the confusion here, is that when you're filtering out false hypotheses (those inconsistent with the observed facts), all remaining consistent explanations increase in probability equally. This means, for example, if you want to explain how Derren Brown won the lottery, the probability that he cheated raises in line with the probability that he just got lucky, which is exponentially low, hence it is almost certain he cheated. The base probability is, as always, based on some form of Solomonoff induction, which is invariant to ‘scale’, hence why we can explain away seemingly-arbitrarily low probability events (α≈0.007297352569) by talking about universes that contain a continuum of different α. In the lottery example, the hypothesis ‘lots of people tried’ is simple, even if the probability of each individual winning the lottery is low. You might ask instead, but what's the probability that that specific person won the lottery? Surely that is exponentially less likely? Yes, indeed, but unlike the Derren Brown case, where P(Derren Brown cheats the lottery) is fairly high prior to him winning the lottery given the public attempt, P(that random guy cheats the lottery) is very low, as most people don't cheat the lottery. Thinking about alternative observers and question-asking is a distraction. Other people asking other questions are not you, so they are not compatible with your observations.