If I understand his remarks (about the Higgs boson bet) correctly, he did not trust the ability of physicists to make that sort of prediction from theory. It is possible that he could have updated beforehand by reading up on the history of the neutrino, positron, charm quark, and neutrino mass discoveries.
Today's post, How Many LHC Failures Is Too Many? was originally published on 20 September 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Say It Loud, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.