I offer you a bet. If I’m bluffing, I’ll give you a dollar. If I’m not, you give me ten thousand dollars. No, you can’t Google it to check. If your utility function isn’t linear with respect to money, I’m happy to lower it to something like 1:1000 instead.
I have two dodges for this bet: first, the cost of obtaining a dollar from someone distant to me is higher than a dollar, and second, even if there were 5% of the community that believed that, they would be the mistaken 5% of the community, and so that has no bearing on my belief. I might believe to 1e-10 that the LHC won’t destroy the Earth, but only to 1e-1 that more than 95% of the relevant physicists will have carefully done the relevant calculations before coming to an opinion.
With freshman-level physics, you can get a strong idea you shouldn’t be worried by tiny black holes. With much higher physics, you can calculate it and see that the speed this thing is traveling at isn’t the limiting factor.
I have two dodges for this bet: first, the cost of obtaining a dollar from someone distant to me is higher than a dollar, and second, even if there were 5% of the community that believed that, they would be the mistaken 5% of the community, and so that has no bearing on my belief. I might believe to 1e-10 that the LHC won’t destroy the Earth, but only to 1e-1 that more than 95% of the relevant physicists will have carefully done the relevant calculations before coming to an opinion.
With freshman-level physics, you can get a strong idea you shouldn’t be worried by tiny black holes. With much higher physics, you can calculate it and see that the speed this thing is traveling at isn’t the limiting factor.