Epistemic status: I just thought this up

There is a well-known style of thinking called the anthropic argument (which has nothing to do with the AI frontier lab of the same name). It goes like this:

Scientist 1: “X seems really unlikely! How come I'm observing it?"
(where X is usualy something like the Hoyle resonance and the resulting triple-alpha process)

Scientist 2: “Your mistake is that you’re estimating _P(text{X})_ — you should instead be estimating _P(text{X } | text{ I'm here to ask this question})_. If the triple-alpha process didn’t work, there wouldn't be enough carbon for you to exist. Consider all the places in the String Theory Landscape that don’t have intelligent life in them asking a question like that right now. The few that do are almost all going to have some sort of fluke like this that makes intelligent life probable there. It's just a sampling effect.”

This is all well and good, and I agree with the second scientist — questions only get asked if there's someone around to ask them. That's kind of obvious, once you stop and think about it.

However, if you apply this sort of thinking too much, you [...]

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