Jason_Malloy
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Jason_Malloy has not written any posts yet.
Jason_Malloy has not written any posts yet.
Related: The wacky "science" of "Unusual Events" and "Mysterious Circumstances":
If an accelerator potentially existed that could generate a large number of Higgs particles and if the parameters were so that such an accelerator would indeed give a large positive contribution, then such a machine should practically never be realized! We consider this to be an interesting example and weak experimental evidence for our model because the great Higgs-particle-producing accelerator SSC [17], in spite of the tunnel being a quarter built, was canceled by Congress! Such a cancellation after a huge investment is already in itself an unusual event that should not happen too often. We might take this event as experimental evidence for... (read more)
"Then, I considered the question of how many mysterious failures at the LHC it would take to make me question whether it might destroy the world/universe somehow, and what this revealed about my prior probability..."
From the previous thread:
"Inevitably, many commenters said, "Anthropic principle! If the LHC had worked, it would have produced a black hole or strangelet or vacuum failure, and we wouldn't be here!"... After observing empirically that the LHC had failed 100 times in a row, would you endorse a policy of keeping the LHC powered up, but trying to fire it again only in the event of, say, nuclear terrorism or a global economic crash?"
If the LHC fails... (read more)
There is a large economic literature on the role of trust in economic prosperity. Survey reports show Nigeria is a low-trust society, but still ahead of countries like Brazil, Mexico, and Turkey.
I think you are going overboard with the folktale analysis, though. We do in fact have a folktale like this called the Frog and the Scorpion. And universally learned aphorisms (succinct folktales) exist to express every contradictory sentiment (e.g. 'the early bird catches the worm', but 'the second mouse gets the cheese'). We don't have the parable of the snake in the anus, but everybody in the high-trust Anglosphere has heard that 'no good deed goes unpunished'. No?