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Vladimir_Gritsenko comments on Costs to (potentially) eternal life - Less Wrong
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Pardon me, now I'm the one feeling perplexed: where did I screw up?
0% is a certainty.
Cf. "But There's Still a Chance, Right?".
Expressing certainty ("0% chance of being revived after dieing in any other way").
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.
You are strictly correct, but after brain disintegration, probability of revival is infinitesimal. You should have challenged me on the taxes bit instead :-)
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.
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...
I like epsilon and epsilon-squared to represent too-small-to-be-worth-calculating quantities.