= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
stcredzero comments on When Science Can't Help - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (69)
There was a time when expecting mothers did the rational thing by not going to the maternity ward. http://www.ehso.com/ehshome/washing_hands.htm#History
Resources to be devoted to cryonics and a future lifespan could also be devoted to the lifespan you are fairly sure you have right now. The situation would be more like getting into an ambulance, when there have been no known successful arrivals of ambulance trips and many known failures.
Ahem. Am I reading this right?
There's a 20-year-old human with three days left to live. They have a choice: Either they spend a million dollars having fun during those three days, or invest that million dollars in research to find a cure for their unique illness and put themselves on life support in the meantime. There is only 10% chance that a cure will be found within <10 years (after which life support fails), but if it is found, they gain all of their remaining life expectancy, which is probably more than 50 years.
You're telling us that everyone should party with the million dollars for three days, and then die.
Except for different values of 20, three, a million, 10%, <10, and 50.
Yes, though with my current value-estimates that's as close as I can get to the same relative expected utility without doing some heavy number-crunching that isn't warranted considering both the situation and the accuracy of my estimates.
[Citation Needed] Ahem.
No, I'm not saying that. I'm painting the other position in a light so it's understandable. Your analogy is incomplete. What if they could also donate that million dollars to other research that could increase the life expectancy of 1000 people by 1 year with 90% certainty?
Ah, yes, of course. I hadn't included any opportunity costs in the calculation, and (perhaps deliberately, though if so I can't remember why) framed the problem as a two-option dilemma when in real life it's obvious to most that this is a false dilemma.
As I stated in response to another comment, these were rough same-ballpark-expected-utility numbers. My response was attempting to make a closer-to-real-world referent available as contrast to the ambulance situation, and illustrate the other numbers of the equation as proportionally as possible (to the resulting EU; the individual numbers aren't nearly in the right orders of magnitude for real cryo).
I'm not claiming that I have an actual solution to the problem or know which is the right thing to do out of all the many options (there are more than the three we've said here, I'm rather confident we agree on that), even for my own utility function, partially because of the black box problem but also because of a lack of information and credence in my current estimates of the various numbers.