RichardKennaway comments on Rationality Quotes: May 2011 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: CronoDAS 02 May 2011 02:33AM

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Comment author: RichardKennaway 02 May 2011 09:10:18PM 12 points [-]

If a guy tells me the probability of failure is 1 in 10E5, I know he's full of crap.

Richard P. Feynmann, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?"

Comment author: soreff 05 May 2011 02:58:58PM *  10 points [-]

For a complex task, agreed. For a simple task, a failure rate of 10E-5 can happen. How often do people trying to eat put their forks in their eyes rather than in their mouths? And, to consider mechanical processes... If the cpu I'm running this browser on failed every 10E5 instructions, it would fail 10E4 times a second. It doesn't.

Comment author: zntneo 11 May 2011 06:38:42PM 0 points [-]

wouldn't the point be that its an amount of precision that is absolutely ridiculous given almost all situations?