steven comments on Should We Ban Physics? - Less Wrong

11 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 21 July 2008 08:12AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (22)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: steven 21 July 2008 05:42:08PM 1 point [-]

Maybe this is naive of me but why would you not just do the standard act-utilitarian thing? Having all of future scientific knowledge before intelligence augmentation is worth let's say a 10% chance of destroying the world right now, future physics knowledge is 10% of total future knowledge, knowledge from the LHC is 1% of future physics knowledge, so to justify running it the probability of it destroying the world has to be less than 10^-4. The probability of an LHC black hole eating the world is the probability that LHC will create micro black holes, times the probability that they won't Hawking-radiate away or decay in some other way, times the probability that if they survive they eat the Earth fast enough to be a serious problem, which product does indeed work out to much less than 10^-4 for reasonable probability assignments given available information including the new Mangano/Giddings argument. Repeat analysis for other failure scenarios and put some probability on unknown unknowns (easier said than done but unavoidable). Feel free to argue about the numbers.