This means that if I continue to procrastinate for more and more unlikely reasons, then I have evidence that cleaning off my desk destroys the universe?
Well, yes but.
Because really, you continuing to procrastinate for more and more unlikely (stated) reasons is also evidence that superintelligent dolphins living on Venus are employing mind control to prevent you from cleaning off your desk, in order to further their nefarious schemes against the wild fleets of caribou on Mercury. This hypothesis does increase in probability, but there's a hypothesis with a much higher prior probability (you're just lazy) which will always dominate it. It counts as evidence, but on its own, it's never going to become a hypothesis likely enough to warrant serious consideration.
Going back to the original point: Why do breakdowns of the LHC provide evidence that the LHC destroys the universe? The 'destroys the universe' hypothesis gains no ground on the 'sabotage' hypothesis nor the 'engineers building something for the first time ever make errors' hypothesis.
The only thing it does is falsify the 'Everything goes off without a hitch' hypothesis, and makes the set of 'everything goes off with n or fewer hitches' hypotheses less likely.
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.
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