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

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (122)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: khafra 26 September 2011 12:45:39PM *  1 point [-]

No, in this disjunction of conjunctions, the more details of any kind you add, the less likely a favorable outcome looks. If we expect reality to be unbiased, we should also expect some ratio of favorable to unfavorable details, which, ceteris paribus, should be maintained as we go to higher granularities of detail.

In other words, "motivated stopping" and "motivated continuation" should not, together, be a sufficient explanation for the results of an analysis.

Comment author: jkaufman 26 September 2011 01:35:10PM *  1 point [-]

the more details of any kind you add, the less likely a favorable outcome looks

Say I went into this thinking my chance of being frozen correctly was 95%. Now, with more details on what has to go right for this to happen, I think 86% is a better estimate. Details don't have to make things less favorable. They just usually do because we are optimistic.

EDIT: that "correctly" above should have been an "incorrectly".

Comment author: khafra 26 September 2011 02:30:20PM 2 points [-]

...but then you think and research for longer, and find out in even more detail what could go wrong, and your estimate drops to 80%. If you can predict which direction your belief will move in the future, something went wrong somewhere.

Comment author: jkaufman 26 September 2011 03:49:54PM 0 points [-]

I'm sorry, I meant to write "incorrectly".