Vaniver comments on Anticipating critical transitions - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: Vaniver 15 June 2013 06:47:30AM 2 points [-]

Why not? Can't we integrate over all of the input distributions, and compare the total volume of input distributions with failure chance greater than one in N with the total volume of all input distributions?

The impression I got was that this is the approach that they would take with infinite computing power, but that it took a significant amount of time to determine if any particular combination of input variables would lead to a failure chance greater than one in N, meaning normal integration won't work. There are a couple of different ways to attack that problem, each making different tradeoffs.

Comment author: Decius 15 June 2013 10:10:20PM 1 point [-]

If each data point is prohibitively expensive, then the only thing I can suggest is limiting the permissible input distributions. If that's not possible, I think the historical path is to continue to store the waste in pools at each power plant while future research and politics is done on the problem.