whpearson comments on Rationality, Cryonics and Pascal's Wager - Less Wrong
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First, where do you get those estimates from ? I can only speak for myself, but I wouldn't put figures on estimates when it doesn't seem like even a consensus of experts would get any of those right, as they verge on questions more or less unsolved. Particularly 3 + 5, and 1 too, are going to yield totally speculative (subjective) estimates.
By that I mean that even if your estimate is as good as you can hope to make it, the real world event that you'd bet on will probably turn to be otherwise, like totally unexpected. Spread those confidence bounds. Orders of magnitude larger. Let's admit we don't know. Narrow, focused probability estimates must mean that you know better than you'd by chance, and for that to be true you ought to have good, practical reasons to believe you do.
Then, even if we don't know, and even if the probability of cryonics working is very, very small ... I'd expect that since your life is instrumentally necessary, for you to experience or do anything, that it supersedes in utility most if not all of the other things you value. You may think you love, I don't know, chocolate more than life, but if you're dead, you can't pursue or value, even, that one. Likely so for anything else. Love, friendship, freedom, etc. Given that, shouldn't you be ready to protect your prospects of survival as well as you can ? The only reason to avoid cryonics then, is if the cost of it, makes it impossible for you to invest in another strategy whose potential to sustain your life (indefinitely) is bigger than cryonics'. If not, and you can take on both, then no matter how low the probability of cryonics working, it'd still be rational to invest in it.
(Only other issue I can see with this outlook is that it has some potential to turn you into a money pump, as long as there's a way to justify your bleeding of money no matter what the cost, to secure trillionth after trillionth of a chance to save your life, so long as you can still afford it, down to your las disposable penny.)
Let us say you value freedom (not just for yourself but for friend/family/fellow countrymen). If you have a choice:
Option 1)Increased the amount of freedom, but killed you Option 2) Decreased the amount of freedom but allowed you to live,
Which would should you choose?
I'd pick 1, sometimes your own death is necessary to promote values even if you won't be around to enjoy the benefits, e.g fighting against the nazis.
Yes, in some cases. Are those a minority, or a majority of the cases where you have to put your life into balance and decide if it's worth being sacrificed for something, or having that thing sacrificed instead ?
It all hinges on your values too. Here it seemed like it was a given that one's life was being considered as valuable, but that under some threshold, the probability of survival was too small to deserve a personal sacrifice (money, time, pleasure, energy, etc.). All of this from a personal standpoint, weighting personal, individual benefits, and individual costs. If all that is being considered is your own subjective enjoyment of life, then it still seems to me that any personal sacrifice is at most as undesirable as the loss of your life. And this calls into question, how much do we value our own personal enjoyment and life, when compared with other values such as other's general well being ? In other words, how selfish and altruistic are we, both in which proportion, and in which cases ?