Pentashagon comments on Pascal's Muggle: Infinitesimal Priors and Strong Evidence - Less Wrong

43 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 May 2013 12:43AM

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Comment author: Pentashagon 09 May 2013 09:50:15PM 2 points [-]

The spaceship has really good life support/recycling The spaceship is self-repairing and draws power from interstellar hydrogen

That requires a MTTF of 3^^^3 years, or a per-year probability of failure of roughly 1/3^^^3.

I've discovered the Universe will last at least another 3^^^3 years

This implies that physical properties like the cosmological constant and the half-life of protons can be measured to a precision of roughly 1/3^^^3 relative error.

To me it seems like both of those claims have prior probability ~ 1/3^^^3. (How many spaceships would you have to build and how long would you have to test them to get an MTTF estimate as large as 3^^^3? How many measurements do you have to make to get the standard deviation below 1/3^^^3?)