Eliezer apparently wrong about higgs boson

duckduckMOO

So someone told me that Eliezer Yudkowsky predicted no 5 sigma evidence of the higgs boson, and that 6 sigma evidence had been found. A quick search found the post referred to, and a slightly longer but not particularly thorough search did not find anything discussing it.

So:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1dt/open_thread_november_2009/17xb (02 November 2009)

I'll go ahead and predict here that the Higgs boson will not be showing up. As best I can put the reason into words: I don't think the modern field of physics has its act sufficiently together to predict that a hitherto undetected quantum field is responsible for mass. They are welcome to prove me wrong.

(I'll also predict that the LHC will never actually run, but that prediction is (almost entirely) a joke, whereas the first prediction is not.)

Anyone challenging me to bet on the above is welcome to offer odds.

In the post below rolfandreassen sets the condition of 5 sigma evidence before 2014 and offers a bet of $25. In the post below that Eliezer accepts.

Discuss.

So:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1dt/open_thread_november_2009/17xb (02 November 2009)

I'll go ahead and predict here that the Higgs boson will not be showing up. As best I can put the reason into words: I don't think the modern field of physics has its act sufficiently together to predict that a hitherto undetected quantum field is responsible for mass. They are welcome to prove me wrong.

(I'll also predict that the LHC will never actually run, but that prediction is (almost entirely) a joke, whereas the first prediction is not.)

Anyone challenging me to bet on the above is welcome to offer odds.

In the post below rolfandreassen sets the condition of 5 sigma evidence before 2014 and offers a bet of $25. In the post below that Eliezer accepts.

Discuss.

The impression I've formed is that physicists have a pretty good idea what's pretty reliable (the standard model) and what's still completely speculative (string theory) but at some point the popular science pipeline communicating the difference to intelligent scientifically literate non-physicists broke down, and so I became broadly cynical about non-experimentally-verified physics in general, when if I'd had more information, I'd have been able to make much more accurate predictions about which were very likely, and which were basically just guesses.