Comment by Jay_Levitt on How Many LHC Failures Is Too Many? · 2008-09-21T19:37:46.000Z · LW · GW

I'm with Brian Jaress, who said, 'I think your LHC question is closer to, "How many times does a coin have to come up heads before you believe a tails would destroy the world?"' OTOH, I have a very poor head for probabilities, Bayesian or otherwise, and in fact the Monty Hall thing still makes my brain hurt. So really, I make a lousy "me too" here.

That said: Could someone explain why repeated mechanical failures of the LHC should in any way imply the likelihood of it destroying the world, thus invoking the anthropic principle? Given the crowd, I'm assuming there's more to it than "OMG technology is scary and it doesn't even work right!", but I'm not seeing it.