bgrah449 comments on Costs to (potentially) eternal life - Less Wrong

8 Post author: bgrah449 21 January 2010 09:46PM

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Comment author: bgrah449 22 January 2010 09:54:30PM 7 points [-]

Cryonics aside, we should talk in probabilities, not certainties, and this is true of pretty much everything, including god, heliocentrism, etc. Second, cryonics may have a small chance of succeeding - say, 1% (number pulled out of thin air) - but that's still enormously better than the alternative 0% chance of being revived after dieing in any other way.

Did these two sentences' adjacency stick out to anybody else?

Comment author: RobinZ 22 January 2010 10:04:03PM 4 points [-]

Good eyes! And it drills down to the essential problem with the but-it's-a-chance argument for cryonics: is it enough of a chance relative to the alternatives to be worth the cost?

Comment author: Vladimir_Gritsenko 22 January 2010 10:06:43PM 0 points [-]

Pardon me, now I'm the one feeling perplexed: where did I screw up?

Comment author: RobinZ 22 January 2010 10:10:20PM 2 points [-]

0% is a certainty.

Comment author: Zack_M_Davis 22 January 2010 10:25:35PM 1 point [-]

Cf. "But There's Still a Chance, Right?".

Comment author: bgrah449 22 January 2010 10:10:49PM 1 point [-]

Expressing certainty ("0% chance of being revived after dieing in any other way").

Comment author: pdf23ds 23 January 2010 12:31:44PM 2 points [-]

I don't have a problem with that usage. 0% or 100% can be used as a figure of speech when the proper probability is small enough that x < .1^n (4 (or something appropriate) < n) in 0+x or 1-x. If others are correct that probabilities that small or large don't really have much human meaning, getting x closer to 0 in casual conversation is pretty much pointless.

Of course, a "~0%" would be slightly better, if only to avoid the inevitable snarky rejoinder.

Comment author: Vladimir_Gritsenko 22 January 2010 10:34:46PM 2 points [-]

You are strictly correct, but after brain disintegration, probability of revival is infinitesimal. You should have challenged me on the taxes bit instead :-)

Comment author: JGWeissman 22 January 2010 10:45:32PM *  0 points [-]

If you represent likelyhoods in the form of log odds, it is clear that this makes no sense. Probabilities of 0 or infinitesimal both are equivalent to having infinite evidence against a proposition. Infinitesimal is really the same as 0 in this context.

Comment author: Vladimir_Gritsenko 22 January 2010 10:54:49PM 3 points [-]

I accept this correction as well. Let me rephrase: the probability, while being positive, is so small as to be on the magnitude of being able to reverse time flow and to sample the world state at arbitrary points.

This doesn't actually change the gist of my argument, but does remind me to double-check myself for nitpicking possibilities...

Comment author: RobinZ 23 January 2010 01:02:40AM 0 points [-]

I like epsilon and epsilon-squared to represent too-small-to-be-worth-calculating quantities.

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