Quote:
Originally Posted by lendaddy
This is full of flaws, like the assumption that we could stop it even if we were a contributor. He assumes results of actions are effective. In reality "Column A" still has world wide catastrophes in it though he removed it and in similar fashion box "A Yes" should still contain global economic depression though again he removed it..
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Not only that, but his decision matrix assigns equal probability to each "row" (that is, the GW hypothesis is assumed equally likely to be true or false). That is simply not the case.
His conclusion is that we need to cease investigating the probability the GW hypothesis is true simply because if it is true, the outcome is really bad.
Using his logic, such a simplistic decision matrix applied to other disaster scenarios would lead us to make all kinds of bad decisions:
to wit, let's apply his logic to the "planet of the apes hypothesis" - Apes will develop speech and enslave mankind.
I've seen video of apes that developed sign language, that's solid evidence the hypothesis is true. We need to act now and kill all the apes.
Bunk you say? Well since we disagree, let's stop debating the APE hypothesis and simply use the decision matrix to choose a course of action.
Let's build his matrix:
Clearly the possible outcome of human enslavement is so bad that we need to stop all debate about the validity of the hypothesis. Let's kill all the apes, just to be sure.
What's the biggest flaw? Assuming the hypothesis is equally likely to be true or false.