[extropy-chat] Peak Oil meta-news

[Eliezer S. Yudkowsky]

Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
> 
> ### If you read Gold's book and find no good arguments, shouldn't your
> expectation drift below 20%, since the absence of evidence in a
> location where it is most likely to be found is a form of evidence for
> absence (i.e. the null hypothesis)?

Sure.  That did occur to me, but I wanted to talk about the simple case 
first.

I also note that, within the restricted fact bucket, absence of evidence 
is not experimental evidence of absence.  The world's stupidest man may 
say the sun is shining, but that doesn't make it dark out.  The above 
inference is from absence of argument, which puts it into the "observed 
opinion" bucket.  Only an experimental test powerful enough to be 
expected to discriminate between abiotic oil and standard oil would go 
into the fact bucket.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence