wuthefwasthat comments on More Cryonics Probability Estimates - Less Wrong

20 Post author: jkaufman 17 December 2012 08:59PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 18 December 2012 07:19:38AM 8 points [-]

To me this just looks like a bias-manipulating "unpacking" trick - as you divide larger categories into smaller and smaller subcategories, the probability that people assign to the total category goes up and up. I could equally make cryonics success sound almost certain by lumping all the failure categories together into one or two big things to be probability-assigned, and unpacking all the disjunctive paths to success into finer and finer subcategories. Which I don't do, because I don't lie.

Also, yon neuroscientist does not understand the information-theoretic criterion of death.

Comment author: wuthefwasthat 18 December 2012 08:42:22AM *  12 points [-]

There's another effect of "unpacking", which is that it gets us around the conjunction/planning fallacy. Minimally, I would think that unpacking both the paths to failure and the paths to success is better than unpacking neither.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 18 December 2012 08:58:50AM 3 points [-]

I wonder if that would actually work, or if the finer granularity basically just trashes the ability of your brain to estimate probabilities.

Comment author: [deleted] 18 December 2012 01:53:59PM *  3 points [-]

I think it's also good to mention that this kind of questionnaire does not account for possible future advancements which are not included due to lack of availability. The same though applies for further negative changes in the future, but when looking at that list for an example items follows are completely missing:

  • Legislation for improving the safety and conditions of cryopreserved people is passed
  • Neuroscientists develop new general techniques for restoring function in patients with braindamage
  • Breakthrough in nanotechnology allows better analysis and faster repair of damaged neurons
  • Supercomputers can be used to retrace the original condition of modified or damaged brain
  • Supercomputers (with the help of FAI?) can be used to reconstruct missing data from redundancy(like mentioned above in Benja's comment )

etc..

..That is to say it's one thing to 'unpack' a proposition and another to do it accurately or at least I would think a questionnaire with uncertain positive and negative future events would seem less biased.

I think it's also worthwhile to consider the possibility that this unpacking business is an sort of an inverse of conjunction fallacy - although it's not exactly the same thing, but I think it's a very closely related topic?

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