thomblake comments on That Magical Click - Less Wrong

58 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 January 2010 04:35PM

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Comment author: jhuffman 21 January 2010 06:55:01PM 2 points [-]

Is penicillin also a solution looking for a problem? How about looking both ways before you cross the street?

Of course not, penicillin prevents death. So does watching both ways before I cross the street. Cryonics does not prevent death.

Do you really place no value on the longer life you would have the possibility of living if you signed up?

Well, I could try and calculate the utility based on my guess at the odds of it working, but I estimate that the utility of the time invested in doing that would exceed the marginal utility I'd find when finished. So I'm not going to look into it, for the same reason that I don't read all the email messages I get from potential business partners in Nigeria. Surely there must be a chance that one of those is real, but I consider that chance to be so vanishingly small that its -EV for me to read the emails.

Comment author: thomblake 21 January 2010 08:13:00PM 4 points [-]

Funny that your expected value from posting this comment was higher than researching cryonics.

Comment author: jhuffman 21 January 2010 08:40:33PM 0 points [-]

Funny, I had the same thought. But I actually I got value from the responses I've gotten in this thread, even if you haven't.