printing-spoon 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: printing-spoon 19 December 2012 02:37:05AM 5 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.

How do you know the raised estimate with this "trick" is worse than the estimate without?

I could just as easily say, "As you merge smaller categories into larger and larger categories, the probability that people assign to the total category goes down."