Woooops!

[jgreystoke]

Physicists often underestimate risk by many orders of magnitude. Came across this:


Probing the Improbable: Methodological Challenges for Risks with Low Probabilities and High Stakes
Authors: Toby Ord, Rafaela Hillerbrand, Anders Sandberg
(Submitted on 30 Oct 2008)

Abstract: Some risks have extremely high stakes. For example, a worldwide pandemic or asteroid impact could potentially kill more than a billion people. Comfortingly, scientific calculations often put very low probabilities on the occurrence of such catastrophes. In this paper, we argue that there are important new methodological problems which arise when assessing global catastrophic risks and we focus on a problem regarding probability estimation. When an expert provides a calculation of the probability of an outcome, they are really providing the probability of the outcome occurring, given that their argument is watertight. However, their argument may fail for a number of reasons such as a flaw in the underlying theory, a flaw in the modeling of the problem, or a mistake in the calculations. If the probability estimate given by an argument is dwarfed by the chance that the argument itself is flawed, then the estimate is suspect. We develop this idea formally, explaining how it differs from the related distinctions of model and parameter uncertainty. Using the risk estimates from the Large Hadron Collider as a test case, we show how serious the problem can be when it comes to catastrophic risks and how best to address it.

Subjects: Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph); History of Physics (physics.hist-ph); Popular Physics (physics.pop-ph)
Cite as: arXiv:0810.5515v1 [physics.soc-ph]

Complete paper:

http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/Papers/Probi...Improbable.pdf

Enjoy!

[jgreystoke]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...y-is-safe.html

Intro:

OUR impressive capacity for conscious reasoning is what most clearly sets us humans apart from other species, our capacity for self-deception over the significance of its conclusions must come a close second.

In the real world, this can be serious. To take a topical example, until recently, people who are supposed to know about such things were utterly confident that serious financial crises were a thing of the past. Financial mathematics of supposedly unprecedented sophistication said so. Just look at us now.

So it's timely to ask if we might be suffering from similar self-deception about other risks we think we understand. A trenchant new analysis by Toby Ord and his colleagues at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford gives pause for thought. The team's paper concerns the risks associated with extremely rare but potentially catastrophic events. They cite the start-up of the Large Hadron Collider, which was challenged on the grounds that the high-energy particle collisions it generates might annihilate the Earth by creating a tiny black hole or a deadly shard of strange matter.

Another take:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...ticle-collider

[jgreystoke]

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/...901.2948v1.pdf

I'm not TOO worried, because of the persistence of White Dwarf(WD) stars which are typically a million times more dense than the main objects in our system. They are well understood, and the nearest is only twice as far away as the Alpha Centauri star system. Many are billions of years old, in spite of cosmic ray bombardment including particles of much higher energy than the LHC can produce.

However I was castigated and accused of being stupid for suggesting in my previous LHC threads that a slight change of the "flavor of the month" version of string theory could lead to an enormous increase in the lifespan of micro black holes(MBHs).

A lifetime of one second or more, now proposed for MBHs produced in the Tevatron range at the Large Hadron Collider, means that the calculated lifetime of MBHs has just gone up 10^26 or more times, ie:

100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000+ times.

[jgreystoke]

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/...808.1415v2.pdf