If it were Warren Buffet? Probably. "Warren Buffet offered me $50 billion if my pen falls to the ceiling" is a much cooler story than "Warren Buffet offered me $10 if my pen falls to the ceiling," but the latter is still easily worth ten cents.
OTOH, "Some guy on the Internet offered me $10 if my pen falls to the ceiling" is not so cool a story. I probably would turn that down.
Agreed that utility is radically nonmonotonic in dollars.
Agreed that it's easy to get overconfident with 9s. It's also easy to anchor on the integers.
All that said: roughly how many objects have you seen or otherwise had compelling experience of having been dropped in your lifetime, would you estimate? How many of those have fallen to the ground, and how many have floated to the ceiling? What happens to those numbers if we eliminating ones more theoretically likely to float than pens (e.g., helium balloons)?
At a guess, I'd say I've personally seen on the order of five thousand non-helium-balloon-like objects dropped in my life, and they've all fallen down. So just starting from there, I'd estimate a > 99.9998 chance that the next one will, too.
If I start additionally factoring in the additional evidentiary value of theoretical considerations, and the absence of other people's reports of such objects floating, and of stories people tell involving objects falling to the ground... man, the evidence starts to add up.
(We've established what I am, now we're haggling over the price...)
...All that said: roughly how many objects have you seen or otherwise had compelling experience of having been dropped in your lifetime, would you estimate? How many of those have fallen to the ground, and how many have floated to the ceiling? What happens to those numbers if we eliminating ones more theoretically likely to float than pens (e.g., helium balloons)?
At a guess, I'd say I've personally seen on the order of five thousand non-helium-balloon-like objects dropped in my life, and they've all fallen down. So just starting from there, I'd estimate a &g
Today's post, Some Claims Are Just Too Extraordinary was originally published on 20 January 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was A Fable of Science and Politics, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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