roko,
Given that at least some phycisists have come up with vaguely plausible mechanisms for stable micro black hole creation, you should think about outrageous or outspoken claims made in the past by a small minority of scientists. How often has the majority view been overturned? I suspect that something like 1/1000 is a good rough guess for the probability of the LHC destroying us.
This reasoning gives the probability 1/1000 for any conceivable minority hypothesis, which is inconsistent. In general, I think this debate only illustrates the fact that people are not good at all in guessing extremely low or extremely high probabilities and usually end up in some sort of inconsistency.
This reasoning gives the probability 1/1000 for any conceivable minority hypothesis, which is inconsistent.
Inconsistent with what? Inconsistent is a 2-place predicate.
It gives us different probabilities for different hypotheses, depending on the minority.
The idea that global warming is not caused by human activity is currently believed by about 1-2% of climatologists.
If you have a hard time finding a theory that you can’t, by this criterion, say is true with more than 999/1000 probability, I’d say that’s a feature, not a bug.
I am not sure what I had in mind when I had written the reply, but I guess it was somehow related to existence of more than thousand mutually exclusive hypotheses supposing destruction of the Earth, each of which should, if given reasoning is correct, have probability 1/1000 or more.
If you have a hard time finding a theory that you can’t, by this criterion, say is true with more than 999/1000 probability, I’d say that’s a feature, not a bug.
Full complex theory, maybe, but there should be plenty of hypotheses similar to “the Earth will not be destroyed by LHC” with far greater certainty than 0.999. What about “the sun will rise tomorrow”?
roko, Given that at least some phycisists have come up with vaguely plausible mechanisms for stable micro black hole creation, you should think about outrageous or outspoken claims made in the past by a small minority of scientists. How often has the majority view been overturned? I suspect that something like 1/1000 is a good rough guess for the probability of the LHC destroying us. This reasoning gives the probability 1/1000 for any conceivable minority hypothesis, which is inconsistent. In general, I think this debate only illustrates the fact that people are not good at all in guessing extremely low or extremely high probabilities and usually end up in some sort of inconsistency.
Inconsistent with what? Inconsistent is a 2-place predicate.
It gives us different probabilities for different hypotheses, depending on the minority. The idea that global warming is not caused by human activity is currently believed by about 1-2% of climatologists.
If you have a hard time finding a theory that you can’t, by this criterion, say is true with more than 999/1000 probability, I’d say that’s a feature, not a bug.
I am not sure what I had in mind when I had written the reply, but I guess it was somehow related to existence of more than thousand mutually exclusive hypotheses supposing destruction of the Earth, each of which should, if given reasoning is correct, have probability 1/1000 or more.
Full complex theory, maybe, but there should be plenty of hypotheses similar to “the Earth will not be destroyed by LHC” with far greater certainty than 0.999. What about “the sun will rise tomorrow”?