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 trustworthiness that people can utter, which makes the general calibration approach to defining the subjective probability hard to use here.
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.
Someone else may put the magnet in the pen; this is the sort of concerns you cannot rule out in real life. Or perhaps Buffet is fed up with being rich and wants to award his possessions to some random person and do it in an unusual way. But I find most probable that your willingness to accept this very bet is caused by the same bias which makes people buy lottery tickets; except here you are able to rationalise the probabilities afterwards to justify your decision.
As for your estimate for pen falling down instead of up (no cheating assumed) being 99.99%: seriously? Does it mean that you expect the pen fall up once in every ten thousand trials? If 99.99% is your upper bound for probability in general (this may be a reasonable interpretation because the pen example is certainly one of the most certain predictions one can state), do you play any lottery where the jackpot is more than 10000 more worth the ticket?
Someone else may put the magnet in the pen; this is the sort of concerns you cannot rule out in real life. Or perhaps Buffet is fed up with being rich and wants to award his possessions to some random person and do it in an unusual way.
As I said, least convenient possible world.
As for your estimate for pen falling down instead of up (no cheating assumed) being 99.99%: seriously?
Firstly, as of my recent discussion with TOD my actual estimate is now more like 99.999% than 99.99%, but still way below 99.9999999999%. I do not assume no cheating in this ...
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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