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TheAncientGeek comments on In praise of gullibility? - Less Wrong Discussion

23 Post author: ahbwramc 18 June 2015 04:52AM

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Comment author: Lumifer 18 June 2015 04:07:40PM 3 points [-]

One underlying technical issue is that floating point arithmetic is only so precise, and this gives you an upper bound on the amount of precision you can expect from your simulation given the number of steps you run the model for.

I don't believe that in reality the precision of floats is a meaningful limit on the accuracy of climate forecasts. I would probably say that people who think so drastically underestimate the amount of uncertainty they have in their simulation.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 18 June 2015 04:29:58PM 0 points [-]

Yeah, you can get arbitrary precision libraries.

Comment author: Lumifer 18 June 2015 05:32:44PM 2 points [-]

You can, and what you'll discover is that they are abysmally slow.