The fact that it hasn't happened yet is not evidence against its happening if you cannot survive its happening. If you cannot survive its happening, then the fact that it has not happened in the last 50 years is not just weaker evidence than it would otherwise be -- it is not evidence at all, and your probability that it will happen now, after 50 years, should be the same as your probability would have been at 0 years.
Do you take the Fermi paradox seriously, or is the probability of your being destroyed by a galactic civilization, assuming that one exists, low enough? The evidential gap w.r.t. ET civilization spans billions of years -- but this is not evidence at all according to the above.
Neither do I believe in the coming of an imminent nuclear winter, though (a) it would leave me dead and (b) I nevertheless take the absence of such a disaster over the preceeding decades to be nontrivial evidence that its not on its way.
Say you're playing Russian Roulette with a 6-round revolver which either has 1 or 0 live rounds in it. Pull the trigger 4 times -- every time you end up still alive. According to what you have said, your probability estimates for either
should be the same as before you had played any rounds at all. Imagine pulling the trigger 5 times and still being alive -- is there a 50/50 chance that the gun is loaded?
I find the technique you're suggesting interesting, but I don't employ it.
(Drawing an analogy with protein folding does not count as "looking inside".)
Tiiba suggested that distributive capability is the most important of the "powers inherent to all computers". Protein folding simulation was an illustrative example of a cutting edge distributed computing endeavor, which is still greatly underpowered in terms of what AGI needs to milk out of it to live up to FOOMy claims. He wants to catch all the fish in the sea with a large net, and I am telling him that we only have a net big enough for a few hundred fish.
edit: It occurred to me that I have written with a somewhat interrogative tone and many examples. My apologies.
I intentionally delayed this reply (by > 5 days) to test the hypothesis that slowing down the pace of a conversation on LW will improve it.
Do you take the Fermi paradox seriously, or is the probability of your being destroyed by a galactic civilization, assuming that one exists, low enough?
When we try to estimate the number of technological civilizations that evolved on main-sequence stars in our past light cone, we must not use the presence of at least one tech civ (namely, us) as evidence of the presence of another one (namely, ET) because if tha...
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