Everything else is way further down the totem pole.

People talk about the grey goo scenario, but I actually think that is quite silly because there is already grey goo all over the planet in the form of life. There are absolutely enormous amounts of bacteria and viruses and fungi and everything else all around us, and given the enormous advantage which would be conferred by being a grey goo from an evolutionary standpoint, we would expect the entire planet to have already been covered in the stuff - probably repeatedly. The fact that we see so much diversity - the fact that nothing CAN do this, despite enormous evolutionary incentive TO do this - suggests that grey goo scenarios are either impossible or incredibly unlikely. And that's ignoring the thermodynamic issues which would almost certainly prevent such a scenario from occurring as well, given the necessity of reshaping whatever material into the self-replicating material, which would surely take more energy than is present in the material to begin with.

Physics experiments gone wrong have similar problems - we've seen supernovas. The energy released by a supernova is just vastly beyond what any sort of planetary civilization is likely capable of doing. And seeing as supernovas don't destroy everything, it is vastly unlikely that whatever WE do will do the same. There are enormously energetic events in the universe, and the universe itself is reasonably stable - it seems unlikley that our feeble, mere planetary energy levels are going to do any better in the "destroy everything" department. And even before that, there was the Big Bang, and the universe came to exist out of that whole mess. We have the Sun, and meteoritic impact events, both of which are very powerful indeed. And yet, we don't see exotic, earth-shattering physics coming into play there in unexpected ways. Extremely high energy densities are not likely to propagate - they're likely to dissipate. And we see this in the universe, and in the laws of thermodynamics.

It is very easy to IMAGINE a superweapon that annihilates everything. But actually building one? Having one have realistic physics? That's another matter entirely. Indeed, we have very strong evidence against it: surely, intelligent life has arisen elsewhere in the universe, and we would see galaxies being annihilated by high-end weaponry. We don't see this happening. Thus we can assume with a pretty high level of confidence that such weapons do not exist or cannot be created without an implausible amount of work.

The difficult physics of interstellar travel is not to be denied, either - the best we can do with present physics is nuclear pulse propulsion, which is perhaps 10% of c and has enormous logistical issues. Anything FTL requires exotic physics which we don't have any idea of how to create, and which may well describe situations which are not physically plausible - that is to say, the numbers may work, but there may well be no way to get there, the same as how there's no particular reason going faster than c is impossible, but you can't ever even REACH c, so the fact that there is a "safe space" according to the math on the other side is meaningless. Without FTL, interstellar travel is far too slow for such disasters to really propagate themselves across the galaxy - any sort of plague would die out on the planet it was created on, and even WITH FTL, it is still rather unlikely that you could easily spread something like that. Only if cheap FTL travel existed would spreading the plague be all that viable... but with cheap FTL travel, everyone else can flee it that much more easily.

My conclusion from all of this is that these sorts of estimates are less "estimates" and more "wild guesses which we pretend have some meaning, and which we throw around a lot of fancy math to convince ourselves and others that we have some idea what we're talking about". And that estimates like one in three million, or one in ten, are wild overestimates - and indeed, aren't based on any logic any more sound than the guy on the daily show who said that it would either happen, or it wouldn't, a 50% chance.

We have extremely strong evidence against galactic and universal annihilation, and there are extremely good reasons to believe that even planetary level annihilation scenarios are unlikely due to the sheer amount of energy involved. You're looking at biocides and large rocks being diverted from their orbits to hit planets, neither of which are really trivial things to do.

It is basically a case of http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScifiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale, except applied in a much more pessimistic manner.

The only really GOOD argument we have for lifetime limited civilizations is the url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox - that is to say, where are all the bloody aliens? Unfortunately, the Fermi Paradox is a somewhat weak argument primarily because we have absolutely no idea whatsoever which side of the Great Filter we are on. That being said, if practical FTL travel exists, I would expect that to pretty much ensure that any civilization which invented it would likely simply never die because of how easy it would be to spread out, making destroying them all vastly more difficult. The galaxy would probably end up colonized and recolonized regardless of how much people fought against it.

Without FTL travel, galactic colonization is possible, but it may be impractical from an economic standpoint; there is little benefit to the home planet of having additional planets colonized - information is the only thing you could expect to really trade over interstellar distances, and even that is questionable given that locals will likely try to develop technology locally and beat you to market, so unless habitable systems are very close together duplication of effort seems extremely likely. Entertainment would thus be the largest benefit - games, novels, movies and suchlike. This MIGHT mean that colonization is unlikely, which would be another explaination... but even there, that assumes that they wouldn't want to explore for the sake of doing so.

Of course, it is also possible we're already on the other side of the Great Filter, and the reason we don't see any other intelligent civilizations colonizing our galaxy is because there aren't any, or the ones which have existed destroyed themselves earlier in their history or were incapable of progressing to the level we reached due to lack of intelligence, lack of resources, eternal, unending warfare which prevented progress, or something else.

This is why pushing for having a multiplanetary civilization is, I think, a good thing; if we hit the point where we had 4-5 extrasolar colonies, I think it would be pretty solid evidence in favor of being beyond the Great Filter. Given the dearth of evidence for interstellar disasters created by intelligent civilizations, I think that it is likely that our main concern about destroying ourselves comes until the point where we expand.

But I digress.

It isn't impossible that we will destroy ourselves (after all, the Fermi Paradox does offer some weak evidence for it), but I will say that I find any sort of claims of numbers for the likelihood of doing so incredibly suspect, as they are very likely to be made up. And given that we have no evidence of civilizations being capable of generating galaxy-wide disasters, it seems likely that whatever disasters exist are planetary scale at best. And our lack of any sort of plausible scenarios even for that hurts even that argument. The only real evidence we have against our civilization existing indefinitely is the Fermi Paradox, but it has its own flaws. We may destroy ourselves. But until we find other civilizations, you are fooling yourself if you think you aren't just making up numbers. Anything which destroys us outside of an impact event is likely something we cannot predict.

Everything else is way further down the totem pole.

People talk about the grey goo scenario, but I actually think that is quite silly because there is already grey goo all over the planet in the form of life. There are absolutely enormous amounts of bacteria and viruses and fungi and everything else all around us, and given the enormous advantage which would be conferred by being a grey goo from an evolutionary standpoint, we would expect the entire planet to have already been covered in the stuff - probably repeatedly. The fact that we see so much diversity - the fact that nothing CAN do this, despite enormous evolutionary incentive TO do this - suggests that grey goo scenarios are either impossible or incredibly unlikely. And that's ignoring the thermodynamic issues which would almost certainly prevent such a scenario from occurring as well, given the necessity of reshaping whatever material into the self-replicating material, which would surely take more energy than is present in the material to begin with.

Physics experiments gone wrong have similar problems - we've seen supernovas. The energy released by a supernova is just vastly beyond what any sort of planetary civilization is likely capable of doing. And seeing as supernovas don't destroy everything, it is vastly unlikely that whatever WE do will do the same. There are enormously energetic events in the universe, and the universe itself is reasonably stable - it seems unlikley that our feeble, mere planetary energy levels are going to do any better in the "destroy everything" department. And even before that, there was the Big Bang, and the universe came to exist out of that whole mess. We have the Sun, and meteoritic impact events, both of which are very powerful indeed. And yet, we don't see exotic, earth-shattering physics coming into play there in unexpected ways. Extremely high energy densities are not likely to propagate - they're likely to dissipate. And we see this in the universe, and in the laws of thermodynamics.

It is very easy to IMAGINE a superweapon that annihilates everything. But actually building one? Having one have realistic physics? That's another matter entirely. Indeed, we have very strong evidence against it: surely, intelligent life has arisen elsewhere in the universe, and we would see galaxies being annihilated by high-end weaponry. We don't see this happening. Thus we can assume with a pretty high level of confidence that such weapons do not exist or cannot be created without an implausible amount of work.

The difficult physics of interstellar travel is not to be denied, either - the best we can do with present physics is nuclear pulse propulsion, which is perhaps 10% of c and has enormous logistical issues. Anything FTL requires exotic physics which we don't have any idea of how to create, and which may well describe situations which are not physically plausible - that is to say, the numbers may work, but there may well be no way to get there, the same as how there's no particular reason going faster than c is impossible, but you can't ever even REACH c, so the fact that there is a "safe space" according to the math on the other side is meaningless. Without FTL, interstellar travel is far too slow for such disasters to really propagate themselves across the galaxy - any sort of plague would die out on the planet it was created on, and even WITH FTL, it is still rather unlikely that you could easily spread something like that. Only if cheap FTL travel existed would spreading the plague be all that viable... but with cheap FTL travel, everyone else can flee it that much more easily.

My conclusion from all of this is that these sorts of estimates are less "estimates" and more "wild guesses which we pretend have some meaning, and which we throw around a lot of fancy math to convince ourselves and others that we have some idea what we're talking about". And that estimates like one in three million, or one in ten, are wild overestimates - and indeed, aren't based on any logic any more sound than the guy on the daily show who said that it would either happen, or it wouldn't, a 50% chance.

We have extremely strong evidence against galactic and universal annihilation, and there are extremely good reasons to believe that even planetary level annihilation scenarios are unlikely due to the sheer amount of energy involved. You're looking at biocides and large rocks being diverted from their orbits to hit planets, neither of which are really trivial things to do.

It is basically a case of http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScifiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale, except applied in a much more pessimistic manner.

The only really GOOD argument we have for lifetime limited civilizations is the url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox - that is to say, where are all the bloody aliens? Unfortunately, the Fermi Paradox is a somewhat weak argument primarily because we have absolutely no idea whatsoever which side of the Great Filter we are on. That being said, if practical FTL travel exists, I would expect that to pretty much ensure that any civilization which invented it would likely simply never die because of how easy it would be to spread out, making destroying them all vastly more difficult. The galaxy would probably end up colonized and recolonized regardless of how much people fought against it.

Without FTL travel, galactic colonization is possible, but it may be impractical from an economic standpoint; there is little benefit to the home planet of having additional planets colonized - information is the only thing you could expect to really trade over interstellar distances, and even that is questionable given that locals will likely try to develop technology locally and beat you to market, so unless habitable systems are very close together duplication of effort seems extremely likely. Entertainment would thus be the largest benefit - games, novels, movies and suchlike. This MIGHT mean that colonization is unlikely, which would be another explaination... but even there, that assumes that they wouldn't want to explore for the sake of doing so.

Of course, it is also possible we're already on the other side of the Great Filter, and the reason we don't see any other intelligent civilizations colonizing our galaxy is because there aren't any, or the ones which have existed destroyed themselves earlier in their history or were incapable of progressing to the level we reached due to lack of intelligence, lack of resources, eternal, unending warfare which prevented progress, or something else.

This is why pushing for having a multiplanetary civilization is, I think, a good thing; if we hit the point where we had 4-5 extrasolar colonies, I think it would be pretty solid evidence in favor of being beyond the Great Filter. Given the dearth of evidence for interstellar disasters created by intelligent civilizations, I think that it is likely that our main concern about destroying ourselves comes until the point where we expand.

But I digress.

It isn't impossible that we will destroy ourselves (after all, the Fermi Paradox does offer some weak evidence for it), but I will say that I find any sort of claims of numbers for the likelihood of doing so incredibly suspect, as they are very likely to be made up. And given that we have no evidence of civilizations being capable of generating galaxy-wide disasters, it seems likely that whatever disasters exist are planetary scale at best. And our lack of any sort of plausible scenarios even for that hurts even that argument. The only real evidence we have against our civilization existing indefinitely is the Fermi Paradox, but it has its own flaws. We may destroy ourselves. But until we find other civilizations, you are fooling yourself if you think you aren't just making up numbers. Anything which destroys us outside of an impact event is likely something we cannot predict.

I was directed here from FIMFiction.

Because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias we really can't know what the odds are of doing something that ends up wiping out all life on the planet; nothing we have tried thus far has even come close, or even really had the capability of doing so. Even global thermonuclear war, terrible as it would be, wouldn't end all life on Earth, and indeed probably wouldn't even manage to end human civilization (though it would be decidedly unpleasant and hundreds of millions of people would die).

Some people thought that the nuclear bomb would ignite the atmosphere... but a lot of people didn't, either, and that three in a million chance... I don't even know how they got at it, but it sounds like a typical wild guess to me. How would you even arrive at that figure? Indeed, there is good reason to believe that the atmosphere may well have experienced such events before, in the form of impact events; this is why we knew, for instance, that the LHC was safe - we had experienced considerably more energetic events previously. Some people claimed it might destroy the universe, but the odds were actually 0 - it simply lacked the ability to do so, because if it was going to cause a vacuum collapse the universe would have already been destroyed by such an event elsewhere. Meanwhile, the physics of small black holes means that they're not a threat - they would decay almost instantly, and would lack the gravity necessary to cause any real problems. And thus far, if we actually look at what we've got, the reality is that everything we have tried has had p=0 of destroying civilization in reality (that is the universe we -actually- live in), meaning that that p = 3 x 10^-6 was actually hopelessly pessimistic. Just because someone can assign arbitrary odds to something doesn't mean that they're right. In fact, it usually means that they're bullshitting.

Remember NASA making up its odds of an individual bolt failing at being one in a 10^8? That's the sort of made up number we're looking at here.

And that's the sort of made up number I always see in these situations; people simply come up with stuff, then pretend to justify it with math when in reality it is just a guess. Statistics used as a lamppost; for support, not illumination.

And this is the biggest problem with all existential threats - the greatest existential threat to humanity is, in all probability, being smacked by a large meteorite, which is something we KNOW, for certain, happens every once in a while. And if we detected that early enough, we could actually prevent such an event from happening.

Everything else is pretty much entirely made up guesswork, based on faulty assumptions, or very possibly both.

Of the "humans kill us all" scenarios, the most likely is some horrible highly transmissible genetically engineered disease which was deliberately spread by madmen intent on global destruction. Here, there are tons of barriers; the first, and perhaps largest barrier is the fact that crazy people have trouble doing this sort of thing; it requires a level of organization which tends to be beyond them. Secondly, it requires knowledge we lack, and which indeed, once we obtain it, may or may not make containing the outbreak of such a disease relatively trivial - you speak of offense being easier than defense, but in the end, a lot of technological systems are easier to break than they are to make, and understanding how to make something like this may well require us to understand how to break it in the process (and indeed, may well be derived from us figuring out how to break it). Thirdly, we actually already have measures which require no technology at all - quarantines - which could stop such a thing from wiping out too many people. Even if you did it in a bunch of places simultaneously, you'd still probably fail to wipe out humanity with it just because there are too many people, too spread out, to actually succeed. And fourth, you'd probably need to test it, and that would put you at enormous risk of discovery. I have my doubts about this scenario, but it is by far the likelist sort of technological disaster.

Of course, if we have sentient non-human intelligences, they'd likely be immune to such nonsense. And given our improvements in automation controlling plague-swept areas is probably going to only get easier over time; why use soldiers who can potentially get infected when we can patrol with drones?

I was directed here from FIMFiction.

Because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias we really can't know what the odds are of doing something that ends up wiping out all life on the planet; nothing we have tried thus far has even come close, or even really had the capability of doing so. Even global thermonuclear war, terrible as it would be, wouldn't end all life on Earth, and indeed probably wouldn't even manage to end human civilization (though it would be decidedly unpleasant and hundreds of millions of people would die).

Some people thought that the nuclear bomb would ignite the atmosphere... but a lot of people didn't, either, and that three in a million chance... I don't even know how they got at it, but it sounds like a typical wild guess to me. How would you even arrive at that figure? Indeed, there is good reason to believe that the atmosphere may well have experienced such events before, in the form of impact events; this is why we knew, for instance, that the LHC was safe - we had experienced considerably more energetic events previously. Some people claimed it might destroy the universe, but the odds were actually 0 - it simply lacked the ability to do so, because if it was going to cause a vacuum collapse the universe would have already been destroyed by such an event elsewhere. Meanwhile, the physics of small black holes means that they're not a threat - they would decay almost instantly, and would lack the gravity necessary to cause any real problems. And thus far, if we actually look at what we've got, the reality is that everything we have tried has had p=0 of destroying civilization in reality (that is the universe we -actually- live in), meaning that that p = 3 x 10^-6 was actually hopelessly pessimistic. Just because someone can assign arbitrary odds to something doesn't mean that they're right. In fact, it usually means that they're bullshitting.

Remember NASA making up its odds of an individual bolt failing at being one in a 10^8? That's the sort of made up number we're looking at here.

And that's the sort of made up number I always see in these situations; people simply come up with stuff, then pretend to justify it with math when in reality it is just a guess. Statistics used as a lamppost; for support, not illumination.

And this is the biggest problem with all existential threats - the greatest existential threat to humanity is, in all probability, being smacked by a large meteorite, which is something we KNOW, for certain, happens every once in a while. And if we detected that early enough, we could actually prevent such an event from happening.

Everything else is pretty much entirely made up guesswork, based on faulty assumptions, or very possibly both.

Of the "humans kill us all" scenarios, the most likely is some horrible highly transmissible genetically engineered disease which was deliberately spread by madmen intent on global destruction. Here, there are tons of barriers; the first, and perhaps largest barrier is the fact that crazy people have trouble doing this sort of thing; it requires a level of organization which tends to be beyond them. Secondly, it requires knowledge we lack, and which indeed, once we obtain it, may or may not make containing the outbreak of such a disease relatively trivial - you speak of offense being easier than defense, but in the end, a lot of technological systems are easier to break than they are to make, and understanding how to make something like this may well require us to understand how to break it in the process (and indeed, may well be derived from us figuring out how to break it). Thirdly, we actually already have measures which require no technology at all - quarantines - which could stop such a thing from wiping out too many people. Even if you did it in a bunch of places simultaneously, you'd still probably fail to wipe out humanity with it just because there are too many people, too spread out, to actually succeed. And fourth, you'd probably need to test it, and that would put you at enormous risk of discovery. I have my doubts about this scenario, but it is by far the likelist sort of technological disaster.

Of course, if we have sentient non-human intelligences, they'd likely be immune to such nonsense. And given our improvements in automation controlling plague-swept areas is probably going to only get easier over time; why use soldiers who can potentially get infected when we can patrol with drones?

I was directed here from FIMFiction.

Because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias we really can't know what the odds are of doing something that ends up wiping out all life on the planet; nothing we have tried thus far has even come close, or even really had the capability of doing so. Even global thermonuclear war, terrible as it would be, wouldn't end all life on Earth, and indeed probably wouldn't even manage to end human civilization (though it would be decidedly unpleasant and hundreds of millions of people would die).

Some people thought that the nuclear bomb would ignite the atmosphere... but a lot of people didn't, either, and that three in a million chance... I don't even know how they got at it, but it sounds like a typical wild guess to me. How would you even arrive at that figure? Indeed, there is good reason to believe that the atmosphere may well have experienced such events before, in the form of impact events; this is why we knew, for instance, that the LHC was safe - we had experienced considerably more energetic events previously. Some people claimed it might destroy the universe, but the odds were actually 0 - it simply lacked the ability to do so, because if it was going to cause a vacuum collapse the universe would have already been destroyed by such an event elsewhere. Meanwhile, the physics of small black holes means that they're not a threat - they would decay almost instantly, and would lack the gravity necessary to cause any real problems. And thus far, if we actually look at what we've got, the reality is that everything we have tried has had p=0 of destroying civilization in reality (that is the universe we -actually- live in), meaning that that p = 3 x 10^-6 was actually hopelessly pessimistic. Just because someone can assign arbitrary odds to something doesn't mean that they're right. In fact, it usually means that they're bullshitting.

Remember NASA making up its odds of an individual bolt failing at being one in a 10^8? That's the sort of made up number we're looking at here.

And that's the sort of made up number I always see in these situations; people simply come up with stuff, then pretend to justify it with math when in reality it is just a guess. Statistics used as a lamppost; for support, not illumination.

And this is the biggest problem with all existential threats - the greatest existential threat to humanity is, in all probability, being smacked by a large meteorite, which is something we KNOW, for certain, happens every once in a while. And if we detected that early enough, we could actually prevent such an event from happening.

Everything else is pretty much entirely made up guesswork, based on faulty assumptions, or very possibly both.

Of the "humans kill us all" scenarios, the most likely is some horrible highly transmissible genetically engineered disease which was deliberately spread by madmen intent on global destruction. Here, there are tons of barriers; the first, and perhaps largest barrier is the fact that crazy people have trouble doing this sort of thing; it requires a level of organization which tends to be beyond them. Secondly, it requires knowledge we lack, and which indeed, once we obtain it, may or may not make containing the outbreak of such a disease relatively trivial - you speak of offense being easier than defense, but in the end, a lot of technological systems are easier to break than they are to make, and understanding how to make something like this may well require us to understand how to break it in the process (and indeed, may well be derived from us figuring out how to break it). Thirdly, we actually already have measures which require no technology at all - quarantines - which could stop such a thing from wiping out too many people. Even if you did it in a bunch of places simultaneously, you'd still probably fail to wipe out humanity with it just because there are too many people, too spread out, to actually succeed. And fourth, you'd probably need to test it, and that would put you at enormous risk of discovery. I have my doubts about this scenario, but it is by far the likelist sort of technological disaster.

Of course, if we have sentient non-human intelligences, they'd likely be immune to such nonsense. And given our improvements in automation controlling plague-swept areas is probably going to only get easier over time; why use soldiers who can potentially get infected when we can patrol with drones?

While we are, in the end, meat machines, we are adaptive meat machines, and one of the major advantages of intelligence is the ability to adapt to your environment - which is to say, doing more than executing preexisting adaptations but being able to generate new ones on the fly.

So while adaptation-execution is important, the very fact that we are capable of resisting adaptation-execution means that we are more than adaptation-executors. Indeed, most higher animals are capable of learning, and many are capable of at least basic problem solving.

There is pretty significant selective pressure towards being a fitness maximizer and not a mere adaptation-executor, because something which actively maximizes its fitness will by definition have higher fitness than one which does not.

I think you're wrong about an important point here, actually, which is that not all things are as exciting as other things. Not all things are equally exciting.

Riding a dragon is actually way cooler than hang gliding for any number of reasons. Riding animals is cool in and of itself, but riding a dragon is actually flying, rather than hang gliding, which is "falling with style". You get the benefits of hang-gliding - you can see the landscape, for instance - but you have something which natively can fly beneath you. You need to worry less about crashing on a dragon than you do on a hang glider. You can ascend and descend at will. You can take off from a lot more locations - hang gliding usually requires you to go somewhere inconvenient to get to, and if you want to do it again, then you have to get your glider all the way back up to where you took off from. And of course if dragons are sentient, sapient beings, that adds a whole additional level of coolness.

Magic not readily replicable by science - the ability to personally fly, shapeshift, clairvoyance (though we have replicated that to some extent with cameras and drones, they are much less convenient), teleportation, and the like are very cool. The ability to throw fireballs or lightning bolts is much less cool, because we CAN replicate those abilities with science (or at least reasonable approximations thereof).

Really though, is any magic cooler than, say, computers?

Understanding protein folding is cooler than special relativity, because there is a lot more you can do with protein folding than special relativity. Special relativity really only comes into play when you're dealing with outer space, which is very expensive and outside of the realm of day-to-day life; GPS is pretty much the only thing which really cares about it as far as normal life goes. Conversely, protein folding allows for all sorts of biological shenanigans, is vital to engineering lifeforms, and allows for all sorts of novel medications, not to mention potential for creating new materials en masse.

It is true that magic is often used as an escapist fantasy. And it is true that it is a logical flaw in such stories (to some extent; it depends on how magic works, after all. And it might also give a lazy person motivation).

Dunning-Kruger

You obviously have not actually read the Dunning-Krueger paper and understood what it showed.

and experience with similar religious movements suggests otherwise.

Name three. Like V_V, I suspect that for all that you glibly allude to 'cults' you have no personal experience and you have not acquainted yourself with even a surface summary of the literature, much like you have not bothered to so much as read a cryonics FAQ or book before thinking you have refuted it.

It takes someone who really thinks about most things very little time to come up with very obvious objections to most religious doctrine

And it takes even less time to notice that there are long thorough answers to the obvious objections. Your point here is true, but says far more about you than religion or cryonics; after all, many true things like heliocentrism or evolution have superficial easily thought-of objections which have been addressed in depth. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't; the argument from evil is probably the single most obvious argument against Western religions, there are countless replies from theists of various levels of sophistication, and while I don't think any of them actually work, I also don't think someone going 'My mother died! God doesn't exist!' is contributing anything whatsoever. What, you think the theists somehow failed to notice that bad things happen? Of course they did notice, so if you want to argue against the existence of God, read up on their response.

Which is more likely - that people are deluding themselves over the possibility of eternal life and don't actually have any real answers to the obvious questions, but conveniently ignore them because they see the upside as being so great, or that this has totally been answered, despite the fact that you didn't even articulate an actual answer to it in your response, or even link to it?

If you had spent less time being arrogant, it might have occurred to you that I see this sort of flip reaction all the time in which people learn of cryonics and in five seconds think they've come up with the perfect objection and refuse to spend any time at all to disconfirm their objection. You are acting exactly like the person who said, "but it's not profitable to revive crypatients! QED you're all idiots and suckers", when literally the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article on ALCOR implies how they attempt to resolve this issue; here's a link to the discussion: http://lesswrong.com/lw/gh5/cryo_and_social_obligations/8d43

Notice how you are acting exactly like cheapviagra. You've come up with an obvious issue for cryonics, and rather than do any - gasp! - research; you commented on it. OK, fine. I then told you that there were replies to the issue, and that you should've known this because the issue is so obvious, and rather than learn a lesson about useful contributions, you are instead self-righteously criticizing me for not willing to drop everything and dig up every answer to every idle passing thought you have!

By the way, a benchmark I've found useful in discussing factual matters or matters with a long pre-existing literature is number of citations and hyperlinks per comment. You're still batting a zero.

I'm pretty sure that, historically speaking, the former is far more likely than the latter.

I'm impressed you've failed to notice that LW is maybe a little different from other sites and we have higher standards, and what happens 'historically' isn't terribly relevant.

The fact that you did not have a counter for my argument and instead linked to a page which was meant to be a "take that" directed at me is evidence against you having an actual answer to my query, which is always a bad sign. This is not to say that it doesn't have an answer, but a quick, simple answer (or link) would be no more difficult to find than the litany article.

Apparently you missed the point. The point was: stop being arrogant. Think for a freaking second about how obvious an argument might be and at least what the reply might be, if you cannot be arsed to look up actual sources. Do us the courtesy of not just thinking your way to your bottom line of 'cryonics sucks' but maybe a step beyond that too.

Indeed, after looking at the Alcor site, and reading around, all I really find are arguments against it. The best argument for it that I've seen is that resurrecting 20th century people might be profitable from an entertainment/educational standpoint

Really? That's the best argument? What did you read, exactly? Where do they say 'there's no reason to revive people except for entertainment'? Or are you just picking out the weakest possible argument because that's what you want to talk about?

As ciphergoth pointed out, there isn't really a good answer here.

What? No! That's not what ciphergoth meant at all! Here is what he said:

And it's not necessarily that the replies to this problem are good, but that they are what you need to reply to.

He did not say the answers were not good. He said, that even if the answers were not good, they are still what you need to deal with. You need to work on your reading comprehension if that's what you got out of his comment. (Shades of Dunning-Kruger, since you brought it up...) Or is this another aspect of you refusing to do any research, bring up the weakest lamest arguments you can find as strawmen, and grossly misinterpret what people have said?

I was reading one article on Alcor which suggested that, even for a cyronics optimist, the odds of it actually paying off were 15% if he only used his most optimistic numbers - and I think his numbers about the technology are optimistic indeed. That's bad news,

No, it's not bad news. It's just news. Expected value is about payoff, cost, and probability. 15% means nothing more and nothing less than 15%; without additional details, it does not mean that something is a good idea and it does not mean something is a bad idea either.

Dunning-Kruger

You obviously have not actually read the Dunning-Krueger paper and understood what it showed.

and experience with similar religious movements suggests otherwise.

Name three. Like V_V, I suspect that for all that you glibly allude to 'cults' you have no personal experience and you have not acquainted yourself with even a surface summary of the literature, much like you have not bothered to so much as read a cryonics FAQ or book before thinking you have refuted it.

It takes someone who really thinks about most things very little time to come up with very obvious objections to most religious doctrine

And it takes even less time to notice that there are long thorough answers to the obvious objections. Your point here is true, but says far more about you than religion or cryonics; after all, many true things like heliocentrism or evolution have superficial easily thought-of objections which have been addressed in depth. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't; the argument from evil is probably the single most obvious argument against Western religions, there are countless replies from theists of various levels of sophistication, and while I don't think any of them actually work, I also don't think someone going 'My mother died! God doesn't exist!' is contributing anything whatsoever. What, you think the theists somehow failed to notice that bad things happen? Of course they did notice, so if you want to argue against the existence of God, read up on their response.

Which is more likely - that people are deluding themselves over the possibility of eternal life and don't actually have any real answers to the obvious questions, but conveniently ignore them because they see the upside as being so great, or that this has totally been answered, despite the fact that you didn't even articulate an actual answer to it in your response, or even link to it?

If you had spent less time being arrogant, it might have occurred to you that I see this sort of flip reaction all the time in which people learn of cryonics and in five seconds think they've come up with the perfect objection and refuse to spend any time at all to disconfirm their objection. You are acting exactly like the person who said, "but it's not profitable to revive crypatients! QED you're all idiots and suckers", when literally the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article on ALCOR implies how they attempt to resolve this issue; here's a link to the discussion: http://lesswrong.com/lw/gh5/cryo_and_social_obligations/8d43

Notice how you are acting exactly like cheapviagra. You've come up with an obvious issue for cryonics, and rather than do any - gasp! - research; you commented on it. OK, fine. I then told you that there were replies to the issue, and that you should've known this because the issue is so obvious, and rather than learn a lesson about useful contributions, you are instead self-righteously criticizing me for not willing to drop everything and dig up every answer to every idle passing thought you have!

By the way, a benchmark I've found useful in discussing factual matters or matters with a long pre-existing literature is number of citations and hyperlinks per comment. You're still batting a zero.

I'm pretty sure that, historically speaking, the former is far more likely than the latter.

I'm impressed you've failed to notice that LW is maybe a little different from other sites and we have higher standards, and what happens 'historically' isn't terribly relevant.

The fact that you did not have a counter for my argument and instead linked to a page which was meant to be a "take that" directed at me is evidence against you having an actual answer to my query, which is always a bad sign. This is not to say that it doesn't have an answer, but a quick, simple answer (or link) would be no more difficult to find than the litany article.

Apparently you missed the point. The point was: stop being arrogant. Think for a freaking second about how obvious an argument might be and at least what the reply might be, if you cannot be arsed to look up actual sources. Do us the courtesy of not just thinking your way to your bottom line of 'cryonics sucks' but maybe a step beyond that too.

Indeed, after looking at the Alcor site, and reading around, all I really find are arguments against it. The best argument for it that I've seen is that resurrecting 20th century people might be profitable from an entertainment/educational standpoint

Really? That's the best argument? What did you read, exactly? Where do they say 'there's no reason to revive people except for entertainment'? Or are you just picking out the weakest possible argument because that's what you want to talk about?

As ciphergoth pointed out, there isn't really a good answer here.

What? No! That's not what ciphergoth meant at all! Here is what he said:

And it's not necessarily that the replies to this problem are good, but that they are what you need to reply to.

He did not say the answers were not good. He said, that even if the answers were not good, they are still what you need to deal with. You need to work on your reading comprehension if that's what you got out of his comment. (Shades of Dunning-Kruger, since you brought it up...) Or is this another aspect of you refusing to do any research, bring up the weakest lamest arguments you can find as strawmen, and grossly misinterpret what people have said?

I was reading one article on Alcor which suggested that, even for a cyronics optimist, the odds of it actually paying off were 15% if he only used his most optimistic numbers - and I think his numbers about the technology are optimistic indeed. That's bad news,

No, it's not bad news. It's just news. Expected value is about payoff, cost, and probability. 15% means nothing more and nothing less than 15%; without additional details, it does not mean that something is a good idea and it does not mean something is a bad idea either.