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jimrandomh comments on How Likely Is Cryonics To Work? - Less Wrong

18 Post author: jkaufman 25 September 2011 11:38PM

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Comment author: jimrandomh 26 September 2011 01:01:12AM *  8 points [-]

I took your estimates, and sorted them into categories. These are the categories I came up with and their total probability of failure, by your estimate:

0.90 Insurmountable technical obstacle (cryonics process at the time you die (not necessarily today) doesn't preserve everything, or technological development stops prior to development of molecular nanotech, or molecular nanotech doesn't do what we think it does and no substitutes exist)
0.74 Other (wtf?)
0.625 Society chooses to let you die or not resurrect you (companies go bankrupt and no one takes over the maintenance; or no one does the resurrection, conditional on no legal problems)
0.56 Societal collapse or human extinction
0.27 Cryonics or resurrection is banned (but I think this is strongly correlated with societal collapse - they're both caused by insanity)
0.27 You aren't actually frozen or your brain is badly damaged first
0.24 Cryonics companies screw up (improper freezing or later thawing)
0.2 You are not your brain
Overall probability of failure: 0.998

This is wildly, wildly pessimistic. Here are my estimates for the same categories:

0.3 Insurmountable technical obstacle
0.0 Other (this list is exhaustive)
0.05 Cryonics or resurrection is banned
0.2 Society chooses to let you die or not resurrect you
0.25 Societal collapse or human extinction
0.15 You aren't actually frozen or your brain is badly damaged first
0.1 Cryonics companies screw up
0.05 You are not your brain
Overall probability of failure: 0.71

Comment author: JoshuaZ 26 September 2011 03:32:22AM 7 points [-]

0.0 Other (this list is exhaustive)

I believe that the point of "other" is some sort of Black Swan event that isn't anticipated by his list. By nature such things are difficult to estimate. I agree that the parent's estimate for this looks way too high. (Part of why humans have trouble dealing with Black Swan events is that they are so rare.) But I'm not sure rounding this down to 0.0 seems good.

Comment author: Desrtopa 26 September 2011 03:39:45AM *  6 points [-]

That strikes me as an astonishingly high estimate for "You are not your brain." Care to elaborate?

Agreed that the list overall is pessimistic, but I would have revised that one way lower.

Comment author: jimrandomh 26 September 2011 03:54:08AM 9 points [-]

That strikes me as an astonishingly high estimate for "You are not your brain." Care to elaborate?

I was going to say something about matrix universes and the possibility that I'm systematically deceived, but then I realized that the real answer for why I gave such a high estimate (0.05) is that I started with Jeff's estimate of 0.2 as an anchor.

(I think jfaufman was originally thinking of the possibility that the spine and peripheral nervous system are important, but you can get those frozen too.)

Comment author: jhuffman 26 September 2011 04:17:51PM *  3 points [-]

Why do you think its only a 10% chance your cryonics company will screw up? That has happened before. Same with Cryonics being banned - it has happened! Over the course of a lifetime and all the time you are in hibernation you think there is only a 5% chance of that happening where you live? Yes its insane to ban Cryonics, and people are not getting any saner as technology improves.

80% chance that you are so awesomecool that future society wants to run your upload for a long time? I think its at least as likely that instead of running a simulation of every corpsicle from our Era, just the most interesting ones are run a lot of times by a lot of different people who want to interact with those simulations.

Yes we're talking about a future with fantastic amounts of computing resources so it wouldn't cost much, but one problem is that a lot of resources are going to be spent working out new projects to run; I'm sure there will always be more computing people would like to do than they actually can do.

Comment author: jkaufman 28 March 2012 12:28:31PM 0 points [-]

just the most interesting ones are run a lot of times by a lot of different people who want to interact with those simulations

Perhaps people signed up for cryonics should try to make themselves as interesting as possible as publicly as possible?

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