Large Hadron Collider feedback needed

[BenBurch]

I've met some cranks in my time, but wow.

 

[BenBurch]

To amplify.

Its not that the earth is at a really small risk.

Its that the earth is at exactly ZERO risk.

No competent physicist ANYWHERE says anything different.

We are at more risk from space aliens wanting to vaporize the earth to make way for a new hyperspace bypass.

So, ignore the troll, he'll go away.

 

[BenBurch]

...

Though the really touching part is the using "I am street orator" claim as if that's some kind of claim to glory. As opposed to just saying "I'm the dysfunctional personality type who'd invent problems to preach about at street corner"

Chicago used to have a place JUST for street orators.

We called it "Bughouse Square."

The reason is obvious.

 

[MattusMaximus]

So, ignore the troll, he'll go away.

Well, not really. JB's decided to take his message to my blog by posting in the commentary section of the entry on this topic. Linky.

Feel free to drop by and make your own posts. This should be fun

 

[HansMustermann]

I've met some cranks in my time, but wow.

Hmm... To be honest, I don't find him that impressive

The archetype of the guy who just has to defend an idiocy he said until the bitter end, just because his self image depends on always being right... well, it's so common that there have been articles and books written on the subject. It's just the classic kind of cognitive dissonance built on "I'm teh genius" and "only stupid people say dumb/false things" (usually with some form of "everyone else is stupid because they do say dumb things" added in between.) Once he said X, whatever X may be, there is no way he'll fit "X is false" into that model without it coming crashing down around his ears.

The "you're all stupid" retort was, in fact, just what I had expected from that kind of personality type all along. I'm only surprised it took him so long to use it.

The archetype of the guy fighting grand battles to save the world, is also quite the classic and common one. But that was clear to you too, since you mention the bughouse square.

The quote that comes to mind is:

It is easier to be a "humanitarian" than to render your own country its
proper due; it is easier to be a "patriot" than to make your community
a better place to live in; it is easier to be a "civic leader" than to
treat your own family with loving understanding; for the smaller the
focus of attention, the harder the task.
-- Sydney J. Harris

 

[ben m]

The LHC may teach us magic stuff. On the other hand, I am guessing that someone gets the Nobel for finding the Higgs, but nothing much else comes of it. We risk earth for this?

No, we don't risk Earth at all.

There is a nonzero chance P that one person currently living hosts the Virus That Will Destroy Humanity. There is a 1/6,000,000,000 chance that that person is James Blodgett.

By getting out of bed in the morning, James Blodgett has increased the risk of a global pandemic by P/6,000,000,000. Since the cost of a global pandemic is infinity, the expected cost of James Blodgett getting up in the morning is infinity x P/6,000,000,000 = infinity. This surely exceeds the expected benefit to humanity of James Blodgett getting out of bed in the morning, even if he is on-track to (for example) discover the fundamental inner workings of matter and energy.

"We risk Earth for this?"

 

[Ashles]

I am practicing the Comtean “mental health” I described in my last post by writing without reading your recent comments.

Also known as the "LALALA Ican't hear you" approach to debate.

Always s compelling.

I am street orator.

No you are another internet crackpot. Congratulations, just you and a million others.

One of my biggest motivators is a stupid statement that needs to be set right.

Even though you can't hear the statements? And they involve a field you know nothing about? And you refuse to listen to responses?
Yeah that's going to be powerful.

You guys are a wonderful source of stupid statements. You may know some physics (your knowledge of even that subject is specialized, not balanced) but you are incredibly stupid on everything else. Did anyone here ever take a course in economics?

HAHAHAHA! Because, obviously, when you are weighing up the physical risks of the most elaborate physics experiment in history, the first group you would go to would be... economists.

I guess it's symptomatic of a desperate need to drag the discussion back to something he actually understands (or at least a topic that he can talk about without being asked to use maths he doesn't have knowledge of).

 

[Dancing David]

The LHC may teach us magic stuff. On the other hand, I am guessing that someone gets the Nobel for finding the Higgs, but nothing much else comes of it. We risk earth for this?

Your demonstration of the risk is lacking.

I see you have not been able to reply to critiques and have restorted to just saying people are stupid.

Well done!

 

[Ashles]

Your demonstration of the risk is lacking.

I see you have not been able to reply to critiques and have restorted to just saying people are stupid.

Well, to be fair he has also accused people of the terrible intellectual crime of not being economists.

 

[temporalillusion]

Someone should really light a firecracker behind his couch when he's watching the news when they turn the LHC on.

*bang* OH GOD!

 

[MattusMaximus]

Just for the record folks, it has been roughly one week since the last Tevatron update... that's 7 more days that the Tevatron at FermiLab has been operating in the TeV energy range with no ill, black-hole-making, planet-destroying effects.

Which is, of course, conclusive evidence that The-End-of-the-World^TM is just that much closer

 

[wackyvorlon]

Weren't economists one of the groups of useless people shipped off by the Golgafrinchans?

 

[BenBurch]

Weren't economists one of the groups of useless people shipped off by the Golgafrinchans?

Yes, with the telephone-sanitizers.

 

[arthwollipot]

So, ignore the troll, he'll go away.

Since when has that ever worked?

 

[Cuddles]

writing without reading your recent comments.

I fail to see how this is any different from your previous behaviour. I guess it's nice that you actually admit to it at least.

I am street orator.

Yes, we can tell. I must admit it seems odd that you think admitting to ranting on street corners is a point in your favour though.

 

[James Blodgett]

This was written for another purpose, but you guys might like it. It makes most of my case.

The consensus among physicists is that colliders are no problem. However, I am concerned about low probability risk. Conceptualize the set of all possible theories about the safety of colliders, an infinite set that cannot be delineated precisely in the real world but can be conceptualized just as we can conceptualize a line of infinite length. Some of those theories permit trouble. In a sense, the probability of trouble is the sum of the theories that permit trouble weighted by their plausibility, divided by the sum of all theories weighted by their plausibility. We can never actually do this calculation since we can never list the infinite set of all possible theories. However, we can say some things about it. For example, we know that the set of theories that permit trouble is not an empty set, because there are known theories that permit trouble.

Some physicists say that the probability of trouble is zero. In fact, this is the official position of CERN. This statement would be true if several commonly accepted theories that result in safety were known beyond a shadow of doubt to be true. However, if we accept any probability that those theories are not true, and that theories that permit trouble are true, then the probability of trouble is not zero. Some physicists would like to denigrate theories that permit trouble, implicitly assigning them a plausibility of zero and the theories that show safety a plausibility of one, so that theories that show safety are definitive safety factors. However, it seems clear that physics in this area is not mature enough to produce definitive safety factors because several confidently-asserted safety factors, asserted as adequate to protect Earth, eroded shortly after their assertion: creation of black holes by colliders was claimed to be impossible, then papers were published predicting them, Hawking radiation was claimed to solve the problem, then papers were published questioning Hawking radiation, and an analogy between cosmic rays hitting Earth and collider collisions was claimed to show safety, then had to be modified. And so forth; listing the safety factors that eroded goes on for a while. Since the area is developing, even successful denigration of existing theories that permit trouble only eliminates a subset of theories that permit trouble since some are unknown; the history of erosion suggests that plausible theories that permit trouble continue to pop up at an embarrassing rate. It seems a poor time to make definitive statements about safety.

Toby Ord’s paper [1] makes the point that the low probabilities of trouble asserted by collider advocates cannot be true because the probability that their theories are wrong is higher than that. This makes much of the point of the preceding two paragraphs. It is a great citation at this point since it invokes the authority of a paper from a prestigious Oxford institute. And the fact that one of the co-authors of this paper is a Ph.D. physicist helps with those physicists who will not accept evidence from anyone who is not.

[1] Toby Ord, Rafaela Hillerbrand and Anders Sandberg, “Probing the Improbable: Methodological Challenges for Risks with Low Probabilities and High Stakes” available at: http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/4020/probing-the-improbable.pdf

 

[BenBurch]

Zero risk is not a low risk, its a zero risk.

The fact that you cannot comprehend this makes me doubt you ever passed at any college at all.

 

[Dancing David]

I read the reference, they basically say "We can not rule out that it won't happen and the risk is high." But then they also state in the paper all the reasons that the risk is negligible to very low.

Why?

In section 2, we show that
the probability estimates in scientific analysis cannot be equated with the likelihood
of these events occurring. Instead of the probability of the event occurring, scientific
analysis gives the event’s probability conditioned on the given argument being
sound. Though this is the case in all probability estimates, we show how it becomes
crucial when the estimated probabilities are smaller than a certain threshold.

yes but they have yet to show that the risk is sound.

Furthermore the distinction does not account for mistakes made
unknowingly. In section 3, we therefore propose a three-fold distinction between an
argument’s theory, its model, and its calculations.

So yes there could be an error, but then the math that accurtaely describes everything would already be wrong in many ways.

What is the margin of error in the math?

Even if the argument
looks watertight, the chance that it contains a critical flaw may well be much larger
than one in a billion.

Except then all the other things would be in error as well.

And the Tevatron would be doing it already. As would the consmic rays.

What about supernova?

Hmmmm.

One way to estimate the frequency of major flaws in
academic papers is to look at the proportion which are formally retracted after
publication.

Excuse me, have they retracted the value of G or the mass os the electron, the fine structure constant?

have they?

No.

Section 3

Wherein they refute themselves

In order to account for all possible mistakes in the argument, we look separately at
its theory, its model, and its calculations

In what follows, we do not restrict the term
‘theory’ to well-established and mathematically elaborate theories like electrodynamics, quantum chromodynamics or relativity theory

So in other words you will GIVE WEIGHT to unsubstantiated theories that contradict the current models that are very accurate?

My self refute and admit your theories are based in error?

Hence we consider adequate models or theories rather than correct ones.

We may assume C to be independent of M and T, as the correctness of a calculation is
independent of whether the theoretical and model assumptions underpinning it
were adequate. Given this independence, P(C|M,T) = P(C), so the above equation
can be simplified:
(3) P(T,M,C) = P(T) P(M|T) P(C).

Ah, so the god of the gaps just walks through the door, it doesn't matter what is correct or accurate at all. The you get even crazier.

By incorporating our threefold distinction, it is straightforward to
apply findings on the reliability of theories from philosophy of science — based, for
example, on probabilistic verification methods (e.g. (Reichenbach 1938)) or
falsifications as in (Hempel 1950) or (Popper 1959).

Estimating the correctness of the calculation independently from the adequacy of the
model and the theory seems important whenever the mathematics involved is nontrivial.

Oh sure when you are trying to be scary, adequacy IE correctness does not matter at all!

they then go on to shoot themselves in the foot over and over.

 

[James Blodgett]

HansMustermann writes

What you're proposing is no less absurd than saying, say, "but you haven't taken precautions for the case that you roll one six-sided die and get two sevens." It just can't happen. Probability is a big fat zero.

A better analogy for the history of safety claims is that collider advocates claimed that the probability of trouble is zero and we are safe because dice have only three sides. I.e., they asserted that black hole creation requires energy beyond the reach of any collider, as claimed in the first RHIC safety study. Thomas D. Gutierrez wrote “it is just about as likely that a black hole will randomly appear next to your head as you read this article.” [“Doomsday fears at RHIC,” Skeptical Inquirer, May, 2000] Then it turned out that dice have a forth side. I.e., new theories began predicting creation of black holes at colliders. Then it was claimed that we are safe because dice have only four sides. I.e., Hawking radiation will dissipate black holes. Then it turned out that dice have five sides. I.e., papers appeared questioning the fundamental theory behind Hawking radiation. Now it is claimed that we are safe because dice have only five sides. Are you sure of that?

 

[James Blodgett]

The sociological discipline of ethnomethodology studies social order and social expectations and the methods by which they are maintained. One of their methods is what is called a “breaching experiment.” This involves breaching social expectations, and observing how participants try to restore social order. I have written to several ethnomethodologists, suggesting that they look at this thread, and the whole collider issue, and analyze it as a breaching experiment.