Fair enough. So we might have enough data for the analysis. But "are commonly quantitative" isn't even weak evidence either way - that is to say, this paper being less quantitative doesn't ring any alarm bells per se, since it's not unusual. But we can get evidence by looking closer: are qualitative risk assessments more likely to be "instructed about the desired conclusion" than quantitative ones? What complicating variables can we prune out to try and get the causal relationship whitewash->qualitative?
Basically what I'm trying to communicate is that there are two ways you could convince me this was a fraud: you could have better knowledge of the subject matter than me and demonstrate directly how it was a fraud, or you could have detailed evidence on frauds, good enough to overcome my prior probability that this isn't a fraud. Saying "they were probably able to produce a more quantitative report, but didn't, so it's a fraud" is neither.
I never used the term "fraud". You seem to be reading more into this than was intended. I just think it is funny that an official LHC risk assessment paper presumably designed to reassure fails to come up with any probabilities - and just says: "it's safe". To someone like me, that makes it look as though it is primarily a PR exercise.
IIRC, others have observed this before me - though I don't have the reference handy.
For background, see here.
In a comment on the original Pascal's mugging post, Nick Tarleton writes:
Coming across this again recently, it occurred to me that there might be a way to generalize Vassar's suggestion in such a way as to deal with Tarleton's more abstract formulation of the problem. I'm curious about the extent to which folks have thought about this. (Looking further through the comments on the original post, I found essentially the same idea in a comment by g, but it wasn't discussed further.)
The idea is that the Kolmogorov complexity of "3^^^^3 units of disutility" should be much higher than the Kolmogorov complexity of the number 3^^^^3. That is, the utility function should grow only according to the complexity of the scenario being evaluated, and not (say) linearly in the number of people involved. Furthermore, the domain of the utility function should consist of low-level descriptions of the state of the world, which won't refer directly to words uttered by muggers, in such a way that a mere discussion of "3^^^^3 units of disutility" by a mugger will not typically be (anywhere near) enough evidence to promote an actual "3^^^^3-disutilon" hypothesis to attention.
This seems to imply that the intuition responsible for the problem is a kind of fake simplicity, ignoring the complexity of value (negative value in this case). A confusion of levels also appears implicated (talking about utility does not itself significantly affect utility; you don't suddenly make 3^^^^3-disutilon scenarios probable by talking about "3^^^^3 disutilons").
What do folks think of this? Any obvious problems?