Today's post, How Many LHC Failures Is Too Many? was originally published on 20 September 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
If the LHC, or some sort of similar project, continually seemed to fail right before it did something we thought might destroy the world, this is something we should notice.
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.
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The third one isn't strictly required, but you would probably see it if this version of the anthropic principle were at work, and so if you didn't see this, it would be strong counter-evidence.
The second assumption is required because when you're doing anthropic reasoning, you are essentially performing a bayesian update in response to the evidence that you are alive and performing a bayesian update. If this is more likely given some hypothesis than another. And P(I am alive| The FTW machine destroys the universe) ~= P(I am alive | The FTW machine does not destroy the universe), until the point at which the FTW machine would be built. (This was briefly alluded to in the post, with the line "Does this mean we can foresee executing a future probability update, but can't go ahead and update now?")
The FTW Machine wasn't built last week, because I had a cold. It wasn't built the week before, because... &etc.
This means that if I continue to procrastinate for more and more unlikely reasons, then I have evidence that cleaning off my desk destroys the universe?