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komponisto comments on Being Half-Rational About Pascal's Wager is Even Worse - Less Wrong
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Why assign a 90% probability to chain reactions being impossible or unfeasible? How should Fermi have known that, especially when it was false?
EDIT: Be careful with your arguments that Fermi should have assigned the false fact 'chain reactions are impossible' an even more extreme probability than 90%. You are training your brain to assign higher and more extreme probabilities to things that are false. You should be looking for potential heuristics that should have fired in the opposite direction. There's such a thing as overfitting, but there's also such a thing as being cleverly contrarian about reasons why nobody could possibly have figured out X and thus training your brain in the opposite direction of each example.
If you view the 90% number as an upper bound, with a few bits' worth of error bars, it doesn't look like such a strong claim. If Szilard and Fermi both agreed that the probability of the bad scenario was 10% or more, then it may well have been dumb luck that Szilard's estimate was higher. Most of the epistemic work would have been in promoting the hypothesis to the 10% "attention level" in the first place.
(Of course, maybe Fermi didn't actually do that work himself, in which case it might be argued that this doesn't really apply; but even if he was anchoring on the fact that others brought it to his attention, that was still the right move.)
I suppose if we postulate that Szilard and Rabi did better by correlated dumb luck, then we can avoid learning anything from this example, yes.