Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Just Lose Hope Already - Less Wrong

47 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 February 2007 12:39AM

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Comment author: wedrifid 12 January 2011 12:42:19PM 7 points [-]

Everything you say after the 'No." is true but doesn't support your contradiction of:

I can't think of one single case in my experience when the argument "It has a small probability of success, but we should pursue it, because the probability ifwe don't try is zero" turned out to be a good idea.

Er ... isn't that the argument for cryonics?

There is no need to defend cryonics here. Just relax the generalisation. I'm surprised you 'can't think of a single case in your experience' anyway. It took me 10 seconds to think of three in mine. Hardly surprising - such cases turn up whenever the payoffs multiply out right.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 January 2011 07:56:15PM 1 point [-]

Name one? We might be thinking of different generalizations here.

Comment author: wedrifid 13 January 2011 07:09:09AM 6 points [-]

We might be thinking of different generalizations here.

Almost certainly. I am specifically referring to the generalisation quoted by David. It is, in fact, exactly the reasoning I used when I donated to the SIAI. Specifically, I estimate the probability of me or even humanity surviving for the long term if we don't pull off FAI to be vanishingly small (like that of winning the lottery by mistake without buying a ticket) so donated to support FAI research even though I think it to be, well, "impossible".

More straightforward examples crop up all the time when playing games. Just last week I bid open misere when I had a 10% chance of winning - the alternatives of either passing or making a 9 call were guaranteed losses of the 500 game.