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Jiro comments on We really need a "cryonics sales pitch" article. - Less Wrong Discussion

10 Post author: CronoDAS 03 August 2015 10:42PM

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Comment author: RichardKennaway 04 August 2015 12:01:15PM 1 point [-]

And a 5% chance of cryonics working seems hopelessly optimistic to me. So let's make that a 0.0000001% chance of working. Suddenly it seems like a pretty lousy deal. Do you think any rational person would still say yes?

No, they wouldn't. If that really is your estimated probability (where did you get those six zeros from? why not three, or twenty?), then you should not sign up for cryo. Those involved think there's a much higher chance than that. In fact, 5% is the usual order of magnitude.

And you won't have any other use for that money when you're dead. Whether it would be better to give it away and certainly die is a whole other issue. (EA meets cryonics — there's a subject for an interesting debate.)

So yes, those signing up are betting on a long shot, but not an impossibly long one.

Comment author: Jiro 04 August 2015 03:09:58PM 4 points [-]

Most people are bad at converting their beliefs to numerical probabilities, are bad at estimating low probabilities in general, and will pick numbers in a certain range that sound low enough even when the number that is actually consistent with their beliefs is much lower. It's like vegetarians who say "well, maybe chickens are sentient enough that they have 1% of the moral value of humans". Almost nobody who asserts that would then save 101 chickens in preference to 1 human.