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lsparrish comments on On the unpopularity of cryonics: life sucks, but at least then you die - Less Wrong
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Not really, because it doesn't take a tiny arbitrary possibility and single it out the way Pascal's Wager does.
Well, Hyena seemed to be arguing that cryonics is preferable even if the odds of success are tiny. Agreed?
The main problem with Pascal's Wager isn't that the odds of winning are tiny but that it unduly privileges a particular tiny possibility. Perfectly straightforward expected value calculations will tell you that you should follow Pascal when you feed them "eternal bliss" as a possible reward -- if you ignore all the points in metaphysics-space besides "generalized Christianity" and "business as usual".
It's a lot harder to argue that the space of cryonics outcomes includes some hidden options that the expected-value result doesn't address. I have occasionally seen people speculate about a sadistic future that wakes cryonics patients up and tortures them for fun, but that seems rather far-fetched.
I think you make a good point, but if the probability of cryonics working is sufficiently low, then relatively speaking, there are a lot of bad outcomes which are not far-fetched. For example, religious fanatics taking over the government and denying life-prolonging medical treatment to people who had previously signed up for cryonics.
Is it really even as remotely likely that religious fanatics will take over and then do that as it is that cryonics would work? (I would think that discriminating against cryonicists, when no religion I am aware of has any real official anti-cryonics position yet, would be something like a billion places down on their TODO list.) Or are you just privileging the hypothesis?
In my opinion, no. But the argument I was addressing seemed to be that one should do cryonics, even if the odds of it working are tiny.
Yes, because there are positive arguments for cryonics working and not having negative effects besides the well-known ones. Fantasizing about religious fanatics taking over during your lifetime is about as sensible as fantasizing about another group of fanatics taking over and cutting off healthcare to everyone who didn't signup on the grounds that their revealed preference is to die sooner. (Notice the isomorphism here to issues with Pascal's Wager and the 'atheist's god'.)
I agree and that's my main point: The case for cryonics depends on there being a decent chance that it will actually work. As opposed to some epsilon.
A useful point of comparison here is a part-per-million chance Looking at the other actions which cost a micromort, I'd say that if the odds were worse than a part per million, filling out the sign-up paperwork alone would outweigh the benefit. (My personal best guess is that the odds are closer to 1%, which, for me, is close to the break even point, mostly due to the financial part of the costs.)
I agree with that. However the term "tiny" can be misleading -- 1% is pretty small compared to what I would think reasonable, but would still be a fair motivator for a $28k expenditure if your life is valued at >$2.8 million.
Uh... more importantly: this scenario just reverses us back to the not-cryonics position because it's simply a failure state for the strategy.
I don't think so, since access to life-prolonging technology might keep you alive long enough to get access to even better life-prolonging technology, and so on.
But it which case you never get frozen, so I don't see the point of this criticism.
Cryonics works like this: (1) you suffer "normal" death, (2) cryonicists move in to arrest all decay, (3) in the future, you may be revived using more advanced technology.
But if you live to see radical life extension, then step one never happens and so the others don't either.
Well the question as I understand it is whether one can envision scenarios in which one would be far worse off for having signed up for cryonics, just like whether there exist scenarios in which one might be far worse off for having decided to accept Jesus. Agreed?
Not really. Pascal's Wager's domain is afterlives, about which we know nothing (either because they're false or because no one can tell us anything). But cryonics has its domain over future possibilities, about which we can know things and so can assign meaningful prior estimates.
While we certainly can think of errant possibilia that make cryonics bad, they are notably errant, requiring us to posit a future incredibly unlike the present, the past and the kinds of changes we see in the world.
I think the actual heuristic used by a minority of them, more than the smaller minority who admit it, is to oppose things unless they are religiously endorsed. For this reason I partially disagree with this select portion of your post. I endorse the rest.