Roko comments on Abnormal Cryonics - Less Wrong

56 Post author: Will_Newsome 26 May 2010 07:43AM

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Comment deleted 26 May 2010 02:49:36PM *  [-]
Comment author: Will_Newsome 26 May 2010 02:56:14PM 0 points [-]

Hm, thanks for making me really think about it, and not letting me slide by without doing calculation. It seems to me, given my preferences, about which I am not logically omniscient, and given my structural uncertainty around these issues, of which there is much, I think that my 50 percent confidence interval is between .00001%, 1 in 10 million, to .01%, 1 in ten thousand.

Comment deleted 26 May 2010 02:58:46PM [-]
Comment author: Will_Newsome 26 May 2010 03:18:25PM 0 points [-]

Oh, should they? I'm the first to admit that I sorely lack in knowledge of probability theory. I thought it was better to give a distribution here to indicate my level of uncertainty as well as my best guess (precision as well as accuracy).

Comment author: orthonormal 27 May 2010 01:23:42AM 3 points [-]

Contra Roko, it's OK for a Bayesian to talk in terms of a probability distribution on the probability of an event. (However, Roko is right that in decision problems, the mean value of that probability distribution is quite an important thing.)

Comment deleted 26 May 2010 03:22:19PM *  [-]
Comment author: Will_Newsome 26 May 2010 03:33:08PM 0 points [-]

Ahhh, makes sense, thanks. In that case I'd put my best guess at around 1 in a million.

Comment deleted 26 May 2010 03:41:31PM *  [-]
Comment author: Will_Newsome 26 May 2010 03:46:32PM 0 points [-]

I wasn't using a normal distribution in my original formulation, though: the mean of the picture in my head was around 1 in a million with a longer tail to the right (towards 100%) and a shorter tail to the left (towards 0%) (on a log scale?). It could be that I was doing something stupid by making one tail longer than the other?

Comment author: Jonathan_Graehl 27 May 2010 03:03:13AM 0 points [-]

It would only be suspicious if your resulting probability were a sum of very many independent, similarly probable alternatives (such sums do look normal even if the individual alternatives aren't).

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 26 May 2010 05:16:47PM *  0 points [-]

It seems to me, given my preferences, about which I am not logically omniscient, [...]

I'd say your preference can't possibly influence the probability of this event. To clear up the air, can you explain how does taking into account your preference influence the estimate? Better, how does the estimate break up on the different defeaters (events making the positive outcome impossible)?

Comment author: Will_Newsome 26 May 2010 05:22:27PM 1 point [-]

Sorry, I should have been more clear: my preferences influence the possible interpretations of the word 'save'. I wouldn't consider surviving indefinitely but without my preferences being systematically fulfilled 'saved', for instance; more like damned.