wnoise comments on Why We Can't Take Expected Value Estimates Literally (Even When They're Unbiased) - Less Wrong

75 Post author: HoldenKarnofsky 18 August 2011 11:34PM

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Comment author: Will_Newsome 19 August 2011 04:25:12PM *  3 points [-]

Astronomy is pretty well understood, so it is pretty easy to estimate the cost of searching the sky for dangerous objects.

Sort of. The possibility of mirror matter objects makes this pretty difficult. There's even a reasonable-if-implausible paper arguing that a mirror object caused the Tunguska event, and many other allegedly anomalous impacts over the last century. There's a lot of astronomical reasons to take this idea seriously, e.g. IIRC three times too many moon craters. There are quite a few solid-looking academic papers on the subject, though a lot of them are by a single guy, Foot. My refined impression was p=.05 for mirror matter existing in a way that's decision theoretically significant (e.g. mirror meteors), lower than my original impression because mirror matter in general has weirdly little academic interest. But so do a lot of interesting things.

Comment author: wnoise 19 August 2011 04:50:31PM 2 points [-]

By "mirror matter", I assume you mean what is more commonly known as "anti-matter"?

Comment author: Will_Newsome 19 August 2011 05:07:39PM 5 points [-]
Comment author: wnoise 19 August 2011 05:25:24PM 2 points [-]

Huh. Glad I asked.

My initial impression is that the low interaction rate with ordinary matter would make me think this would not be a good explanation for anomalous impacts. But I obviously haven't examined this in anywhere near enough detail.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 19 August 2011 09:49:48PM 3 points [-]

See elsewhere in the thread. E.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0107132

Comment author: wnoise 20 August 2011 01:14:42AM 0 points [-]

I did see those replies. Thanks.