Luke_A_Somers comments on Anticipating critical transitions - Less Wrong

17 Post author: PhilGoetz 09 June 2013 04:28PM

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Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 10 June 2013 01:13:28PM 3 points [-]

But many things we might simulate with computers, like the weather, the economy, or existential risk, are full of power law distributions that might not have a convergent expected value.

Some of those power laws have to break down. If you find a storm of 10^30 J, it isn't Terrestrial weather any more. Similarly, if we ever had 10000% growth in one year, that's probably because we hit the singularity and all bets are off.

The models may incorporate those divergences, but only because they're wrong.