No, I would run out of statements I was that confident in long before I reached a trillion.
Nitpicking.
First, there is more than a 1/10^12 chance of cheating in that game, by putting a strong magnet in the ceiling for example.
You know that you're not cheating, and it doesn't seem likely that Buffet would cheat when doing so would make him less likely to win. Of course, maybe there's a 10^-10 chance that Buffet would go insane and cheat anyway, but can we just assume a least convenient possible world where we ignore those interfering issues.
Or come up with your own hypothetical if you don't like mine (you could use Omega instead of Buffet to eliminate cheating).
And second, utility is not linear in money over that interval; Warren Buffet would value a ten cent gain less than 1/10^12 as much as avoiding a $10^11 loss.
I don't care what Buffet values, the important thing is what I value, and think I actually value avoiding a ten cent loss a lot more than 10^-12 as much as achieving a $50billion gain.
No, I would run out of statements I was that confident in long before I reached a trillion.
Nitpicking.
Not at all. The feeling of impossibility of making trillion statements like that and never being wrong partly stems from our inability to conceive trillion distinct statements supported so much by evidence as the validity of gravitational laws. (The second reason for the intuition is imagining making mistake because of being tired of making one prediction after another.) Certainly there is far less than trillion independent statements of comparable t...
Today's post, Some Claims Are Just Too Extraordinary was originally published on 20 January 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
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.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.