Morendil comments on That Magical Click - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: denisbider 25 January 2010 03:13:23PM 1 point [-]

I agree, cryonics is failing to "click" with me for largely the same reason - that the estimate of me benefitting from cryonics is not 95%, but more like 5%. If the likelihood of my revival and resumption of awareness is only 5%, then it doesn't much alleviate the emotional trauma of death.

Plus, I can imagine the possibility of a harmful revival, where the mind is cloned and resumes awareness, only to become a lab experiment that gets reused tens of thousands of times.

Comment author: Morendil 25 January 2010 05:19:58PM 1 point [-]

5% is how many times better than 0% ?

Comment author: ciphergoth 25 January 2010 05:57:30PM 1 point [-]

But this invites Pascal's Wager/Pascal's Mugging type arguments. It's not enough to argue that it's more than zero - it has to be enough to be worth the investment.

Comment author: Furcas 25 January 2010 06:45:01PM *  5 points [-]

The real flaw in Pascal's Wager isn't that the probability of getting the desired payoff is extremely low, it's that the probability of getting the payoff by holding any one belief from a set of different beliefs is the same. For example, the probability of being rewarded for being an atheist by a God who loves epistemic rationalism is at least as big as the probability of being rewarded by Yahweh for being a Christian.

The probability of cryonics getting us the payoff, however, is a lot bigger than the probability that not signing up for cryonics will get us the payoff, so it's not a Pascal's Wager type argument to point out that cryonics is worth it even if the probability of it working is very small.