ChrisA comments on Congratulations to Paris Hilton - Less Wrong

-2 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 19 October 2007 12:31AM

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

Comments (96)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: ChrisA 19 October 2007 07:56:43AM 0 points [-]

On cryonics, basically I understand the wager as that for a (reasonably) small sum I can obtain a small, but finite, possibility of immortality, therefore the bet has a very high return, so I should be prepared to make the bet. But this logic to me has the same flaw as Pascal’s wager. There are many bets that appear to have similar payoff. For instance, although I am an atheist, I cannot deny there is a small, probably smaller than cryonics, chance that belief in a God is correct. Could cryonics be like religion in this way, an example of exposure bias, resulting from the fact that someone has a business model called cryonics; as a result this approach to immortality is given higher visibility (whether through traditional advertising or through motivation on behalf of the investors to raise it's profile)?