Regarding your edit: I certainly agree that assertions that are quite strongly believed by people who are likely to have arrived at those beliefs correctly tend to be more plausible than assertions that aren't. But that has nothing to do with whether any given observed fact is evidence of such a belief.
You're correct. I was thinking in terms of "what evidence would be required for me to conclude that the FTW machine destroys the universe, and was visualizing other people coming to that conclusion for theoretical reasons as assisting in locating that hypothesis.
Today's post, How Many LHC Failures Is Too Many? was originally published on 20 September 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Say It Loud, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.