Comment on The mind-killer

Thu, 14 May 2009 18:17:20 GMT

You clipped out "to within an order of magnitude". I stated that my best-guess probability for human extinction within a century was 10^(-6 +/- 4). This is a huge confusion - 9 orders of magnitude on the probability - yet still means that I have over 80% confidence that the probability is under 10^-2. There is no contradiction here.

(It also means that, despite believing that extinction is probably one-in-a-million, I should treat it as more like one-in-a-thousand, because averaging over the meta-probability distribution naturally weights the high end. It would be a pity if this effect, of uncertainty inflating small probabilities, resulted in social feedback. When you hear me say "we should treat it as a .1% risk", I am implicitly stating that all models I can credit give a significantly lower risk. If your best model's risk-estimate is .01%, I am actually telling you that I think your model overestimates the risk.)

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