The dangers of zero and one
Eliezer wrote a post warning against unrealistically confident estimates, in which he argued that you can't be 99.99% sure that 53 is prime. Chris Hallquist replied with a post arguing that you can.
That particular case is tricky. There have been many independent calculations of the first hundred prime numbers. 53 is a small enough number that I think someone would notice if Wikipedia included it erroneously. But can you be 99.99% confident that 1159 is a prime? You found it in one particular source. Can you trust that source? It's large enough that no one would notice if it were wrong. You could try to verify it, but if I write a Perl or C++ program, I can't even be 99.9% sure that the compiler or interpreter will interpret it correctly, let alone that the program is correct.
Rather than argue over the number of nines to use for a specific case, I want to emphasize the the importance of not assigning things probability zero or one. Here's a real case where approximating 99.9999% confidence as 100% had disastrous consequences.
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