Z._M._Davis comments on How Many LHC Failures Is Too Many? - Less Wrong

16 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 September 2008 09:38PM

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

Comments (130)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Z._M._Davis 20 September 2008 11:14:31PM 10 points [-]

Say our prior odds for the LHC being a destroyer of worlds are a billion to one against. Then this hypothesis is at negative ninety decibels. Conditioned on the hypothesis being true, the probability of observing failure is near unity, because in the modal worlds where the world really is destroyed, we don't get to make an observation--or we won't get to remember it very long. Say that conditioned on the hypothesis being false, the probability of observing failure is one-fifth--this is very delicate equipment, yes? So each observation of failure gives us 10log(1/0.2), or about seven decibels of evidence for the hypothesis. We need ninety decibels of evidence to bring us to even odds; ninety divided by seven is about 12.86. So under these assumptions it takes thirteen failures before we believe that the LHC is a planet-killer.