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Vaniver comments on Just Lose Hope Already - Less Wrong
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From four posts down:
That is, the chances of cryonics working is something like six or seven orders of magnitude better than winning the lottery.
While that shows the lottery is stupid, it doesn't show that cryonics has made it into smart territory. Things are further complicated by the fact that your odds of winning the lottery are known, certain, and printed on the ticket- your odds of winning the cryonics lottery are fundamentally uncertain.
I disagree with 'fundamentally'. It is no more uncertain than any future event; to call all future events fundamentally uncertain could be true on certain acceptable definitions of fundamental, but it's hardly a useful word in those cases.
Medical research and testing has been done with cryonics; we have a good idea of exactly what kinds of damage occur during vitrification, and a middling idea of what would be required to fix it. IIRC cryonics institutions remaining in operation, the law not becoming hostile to cryonics, and possible civilization-damaging events (large-scale warfare, natural disasters, etc) are all bigger concerns than the medicine involved. All of these concerns can be quantified.
I am talking about the odds, and even if I were talking about the event, I feel pretty strongly that we can be more certain about things like the sun rising tomorrow than me winning the lottery next week. My odds of winning the with each ticket I buy are 1 in X plus/minus some factor for fraud/finding a winning ticket. That's a pretty low range of odds. My odds for being revived after cryonics have a much wider range, since the events leading up to it are far more complicated than removing 6 balls from an urn. Hence, fundamental uncertainty because the fundamental aspects of the problem are different in a way that leads to less certainty.
Yes, they have a much wider range, but all mathematical treatments of that range that I've seen come out showing the lower limit to be at least a few orders of magnitude greater than the lottery. Even though we are uncertain about how likely cryonics is to work, we are certain it's more likely than winning the lottery.
Unless you discover a way of gaming the lottery system.
Though that's actually illegal, so you'd have to include the chance of getting caught.