Douglas_Knight 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: Douglas_Knight 19 August 2011 05:32:05PM 6 points [-]

Yes, you should compute the danger multiple ways, counting asteroids, craters, and extinction events. If there are 3x too many craters, then it may be that 2/3 of impacts are caused by objects that we can't detect. Giving up on solving the whole or even most of the problem may sound bad, but it just reduces the expected value by a factor of 3, which is pretty small in this context.