8 ms·

Being mummified was a clever move. If his brain were preserved long enough, then he may hypothetically have been brought back to life. A bit like cryogenics.

by jkabrg 8y ago

jacquesm 8y ago
I'd give it roughly the same chance that I give the heads sitting in cryogenic storage being brought back to life: 0.
- garmaine 8y ago
  And I'm sure you have a rigorous evidence-backed argument backing that up.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    Just as rigorous and evidence-backed as the people claiming they will save your head for the future to bring it back (or some construct of you).
    - garmaine 8y ago
      Go look it up; they aren't claiming that. You're fighting a strawman. What they are claiming that they are preserving some record of the information that makes you up on the hope that it would be sufficient for future engineers to reconstruct some version of you. All they are claiming is that cryonic vitrification or aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation preserves in an information-theory sense the microstructure of the brain to sufficient detail that the connectome can be reconstructed by physically realizable scanning mechanisms, which we might not have now but are permitted by the laws of physics. That's a much weaker argument, but one which actually IS supported by actual scientific papers in the field. And it's all that cryonics organizations have ever argued for.
      - jacquesm 8y ago
        > What they are claiming that they are preserving some record of the information that makes you up on the hope that it would be sufficient for future engineers to reconstruct some version of you. Yes, that's what they are claiming, but there is zero proof this is going to happen. In fact, given the long term stability of real world artifacts that are far more durable than dewar flasks there are substantial obstacles in the way of success here besides the non-viable scientific parts of it. The whole point is that this is a 'hope' about as useful as the hope that there is a heaven or a life after death. Death is final, until proven otherwise, and once if it is proven that it isn't we will know the pre-conditions required for successful preservation. Keep in mind that freezing the brain actually destroys it further, the resulting structures may look like they still preserve information when in fact they probably won't, just like a frozen and then thawed out steak still looks like the original but has structurally been completely altered. > All they are claiming is that cryonic vitrification or aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation preserves in an information-theory sense the microstructure of the brain to sufficient detail that the connectome can be reconstructed by physically realizable scanning mechanisms, which we might not have now but are permitted by the laws of physics. The laws of physics have little to do with it, it all depends on how much - if anything - of value is still present and recoverable from dead tissue. So far there is no proof that high level constructs such as memories and identity would be preserved through such a cycle. > That's a much weaker argument, but one which actually IS supported by actual scientific papers in the field. Actual scientific papers are not the equivalent of proof, they are merely the advancement of theories in the scientific sense, lacking - for now - evidence supporting those theories. Cryonics organizations are very careful to ride that fine line between selling hope and selling bull-shit. They have to because that's where the gullible nerds will be more than happy to part with their money. The short version of all this is: Hope Springs Eternal. And hope for an eternal life is common to Catholics looking for salvation, uploaders, cryogenic preservers and rapture kooks. And they all have another thing in common too: they all die anyway, just like everybody and everything else that is alive.
        joefourier 8y ago
        Why do you have such a strong emotional hostility towards cryonics? First off, you don't understand how cryonics work, from the organizations to the procedure. It is not freezing, but vitrification, as anti-freeze is essentially pumped into the circulatory system to avoid the damage from icing you mentioned (toxicity of the anti-freeze is another problem). It may or may not work, but it is purely based in physical phenomena. Tissues, organs and simple organisms have been lowered to cryogenic temperature and then brought back, and extending that process to humans is not irrational. Animal brains have been vitrified and the structure of the connectome was still intact. The alternative to cryonics is for your brain to rot or be incinerated. Are you saying that the chances of reviving or reconstructing a well preserved, vitrified brain is the same as a pile of ashes? If so, that seems the more irrational point of view.
  - malux85 8y ago
    I think the chances are close to zero - desiccation of the brain tissue destroys the proximal and distal dendrites and therefore the connections that represent our memories and consciousness. Freezing causes the water to expand and rupture the cell membranes, which also causes irreversible damage and information loss. I hope we can discover a better preservation technique until we get neural uploading sorted, I think we are closer than ever in history, and I'm optimistic!
    - garmaine 8y ago
      Freezing isn't used by anybody. Cryonics organizations use vitrification, which preserves the brain (and body) in a sort of liquid-glass state. The antifreeze used is massively toxic should the patient ever be warmed up, but at liquid-N2 temperatures it serves to preserve structure without the freezing damage you talk about, and nanotech-assisted recovery OR structural scanning would occur at that temperature. The newer techniques of room temperature preservation (with no hope of biological recovery, but very high hopes of structural preservation) apply structural scaffolding that keeps such neural microstructure in place, fossilizing the smallest relevant structures in a way a simple polish-and-scan destructive process can pick up, today. The latter point shows just how little jacquesm knows about this space. A rather large prize purse was recently won by a startup that preserved, through demonstrated scan-and-upload, a mammalian brain. Of course the brain-emulation software wasn't there to make a little VR mouse, but recovery of the brain's connectome was demonstrated.
- 1996 8y ago
  No need to bring the brain back to life. When memories and the connectome are finally understood, simply scan the brain, even by destroying the original if needed: cut it into slices, scan it, then upload it to a robotic body, or even a simple computer simulation (good enough for me!) I do not want to be "flesh and bones" when we will have better alternatives. I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what we are? I can’t even express these things properly, because I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    > When memories and the connectome are finally understood IF. > simply scan the brain Simply? > I do not want to be "flesh and bones" when we will have better alternatives. IF. > Do you see the absurdity of what we are? We are no more absurd than your vision of what you wish to become, with the one note that we are what we are and your wishes will very likely remain just that. The whole cryogenics movement is strongly reminiscent of a religion: it costs lots of money, it makes vague promises of an afterlife and 'freethinkers' are relentlessly attacked by the true believers. Show me the proof, until then it's just another scam. > and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. There is some hot air involved here, but not that one.
    - 1996 8y ago
      If, if, if: yes I know, there is no guarantee. There is no proof. I make bets. There is little profit to be found where there is no risk involved. Immortality is just that biggest profit possible, for which many risks must be taken. You know what's worse than my bets: someone not making them. That person sure is never coming back when the body and brain rot and turns to dust. Anyway, if that is what you want, and you made an informed decision, I respect our differences
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
- mysterypie 8y ago
  Looking back ~125 years, if you said to the average person that we could identify him decades later from an object he touched, before the idea of fingerprint identification was well known, it would have sounded ridiculous. These days, decades old murders are solved with DNA -- hypothetically needing nothing more than a single cell. In both examples, we assumed simply that the information (fingerprints or DNA) was preserved. The technology for cryonic retrieval might be very far off, and the economics might not make sense, but if the mental information was preserved, then a possibility exists.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    > I don't get why people so dismissive about cryonics Lack of proof combined with zealotry. > The information is there, preserved maybe. And even if it is there that's a far cry from retrieving it, further from re-uploading it into something capable of making sense of that information, further still from getting something that becomes self-aware (and won't go instantly insane), and further than that from bringing the whole thing back to life. It is about as far from reality as the afterlife as peddled by religion at this point, with the caveat that maybe one day it will be done. But I wouldn't hold my breath. (Pun intended...). > Maybe it won't make economics sense to reconstruct the preserved minds. But it makes good economics sense to offer this 'service' to people who are gullible and aware of Pascal's wager. > But saying it's zero chance sounds very close to an argument for logical impossibility. It is very close to zero. So close that we might as well consider it an impossibility. It falls right into the 'wouldn't it be nice if' category of wishes. See also: Theranos and other bs along those lines. > Looking back ~125 years, if you said to the average person that we could identify him decades later from an object he touched, before the idea of fingerprint identification was well known, it would have sounded ridiculous. 1858 wants a word with you. > And today we know that you can uniquely identify a person and construct a model of his face from the DNA in a single microscopic cell. You are vastly over-selling the capabilities of the DNA facial reconstruction software as we have it today. It accounts for some double digit amount of variation. Even so, that at least has a chance of happening once you have enough information to factor in the effect of nourishment and aging. But the chances of abuse and false positive are so large that the only place where you'll see it used is missing person cases and cold case revival, and that's a good thing imo. > The info is there Sure, but that 'mere matter of engineering' in the middle is where the problem lies and given the challenges in any of the sub-steps required to make this a reality it is SF at best in the present and a scam at worst.
- ALittleLight 8y ago
  As a thought experiment, if you knew for certain that in a hundred years an individual who was long dead was brought back to life, and you had to guess whether the recently deceased was a cryogenic patient from 2018 or a mummified Emperor from antiquity - would you be ambivalent about the choices? If not, then you don't really think they're equally good paths to extra life.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - benchaney 8y ago
    Your logic divides by zero in this case.
  - enjeyw 8y ago
    Your thought experiment got me thinking (which I guess is the point lol!): Imagine you knew for certain that in a couple hundred years individuals could be brought back to life at great expense, AND that it was at least 1/100th as feasible for mummified remains as it was for cryopreservation. Who do think scientists would put more effort into bringing back? Another 'Joe Blogs' from 2018, or a mummified Emperor from antiquity?
    - JoshTriplett 8y ago
      The former, because the difference in preservation methods make success far, far more likely. And as the process improves, the cost will decrease.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    Thought experiments of this kind are dissimilar to say Einstein fantasizing about elevators in that they do not yield insight over and beyond that which is already readily apparent. So rather than a thought experiment you should stick to real experiments and the experimental proof derived from there. As it sits today the mummy and the frozen patient are both dead as a doornail and nothing in present day science will bring them back. Keep in mind that if you want to play this game your best bet would be someone that's been freshly dead for about 20 minutes or so rather than the two cases you use to illustrate your point, and as long as that's not close to feasible the bet cryogenic people are making is really no different than believers sending their fortune to the church after death in order to be guaranteed a seat at the table in the afterlife. Religion masquerading as science is more disgusting to me than mere religion, at least the latter are somewhat transparent about it all being fairy tales and fiction.
- visarga 8y ago
  I'd rather have my experiences and actions (reactions) recorded for later. Even if we don't know how to upload a person now, we might know later. Recording is possible even now with the tech at our disposal. Deep Learning shows that you can build a model with enough input-output pairs. On a parallel topic - I think the data we are creating today, especially since the expansion of internet and sensors, might be used by future AGI to simulate the conditions that led to its creation for What-if scenarios & AGI pre-history. We might be in such a sim right now. Previous ages left too little information, so they can't be simulated as well. On the other hand, we leave tons of digital breadcrumbs, so we could be a prime target.
- taejo 8y ago
  0 and 1 are really extreme probabilities. It's often better to think of a probability of 0.001 being closer to 0.5 than to 0. As odds ratios it's easy to see that 999:1 is closer to 1:1 than to infinity:1. 0 probability means that even infinitely many pieces of evidence will not change your assessment: no matter how many heads you see restored from cryogenic storage, you will still believe that the probability is 0, and will have to find other, increasingly unlikely, explanations for the evidence. For a more in-depth and slightly more rigorous discussion, see 0 And 1 Are Not Probabilities: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QGkYCwyC7wTDyt3yT/0-and-1-are-not-probabilities https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QGkYCwyC7wTDyt3yT/0-and-1...
  - Retric 8y ago
    0.001 is closer to 0 than 0.003 ;) All probability's have error bars, so 0 +/ 10e-20 is still very much 0.
    - taejo 8y ago
      Thanks, I can count :) Of course 0.001 is closer to 0 than 0.003, but my point is that linear distance is not a very good way of comparing probabilities-as-degrees-of-certainties: rather than differences of probabilities one should consider the ratios of odds ratios (or differences of log-odds-ratios) because these better represent how we update our certainty in the light of evidence. Frequentist probabilities can have error bars (if I repeat some experiment N times and observe no successes, I estimate the probability as "0 with error bars"), but I'm not sure that Bayesian probabilities-as-degrees-of-certainty naturally have error bars. If you're uncertain of your certainty, isn't that the same as just being less certain? As I say, I'm not sure of the mathematics here.
      - Retric 8y ago
        Bayesian has direct error bars and error bars on your error bars, and error bars on the ... It’s however generally ignored. Edit: I believe I preformed this experiment which updates my prior probability. Anyway, my point is not that you should interpret probability functions in a linear fashion just that non linear interpretations are not nessisarily more accurate. Suppose I am playing a chess I have non zero odds for a 2 win streak, but the odds of winning 1 googleplex games in a row is 0. Not becase it’s some probability ^ a googleplex but rather I am not going to play that many games. Sure, you might say their are some error bars on that zero, and error bars on those error bars etc, but still the direct estimate is still a 0 probability.
riffraff 8y ago
well, maybe. I don't know how chinese mummification worked, but Egyptian mummification removed the brain, which was considered something useless and generally evil or a source of problems (the soul is in the heart, right?)

Being mummified was a clever move. If his brain were preserved long enough, then he may hypothetically have been brought back to life. A bit like cryogenics.

by jkabrg 8y ago

Being mummified was a clever move. If his brain were preserved long enough, then he may hypothetically have been brought back to life. A bit like cryogenics.

jacquesm 8y ago

I'd give it roughly the same chance that I give the heads sitting in cryogenic storage being brought back to life: 0.

garmaine 8y ago
And I'm sure you have a rigorous evidence-backed argument backing that up.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  Just as rigorous and evidence-backed as the people claiming they will save your head for the future to bring it back (or some construct of you).
  - garmaine 8y ago
    Go look it up; they aren't claiming that. You're fighting a strawman. What they are claiming that they are preserving some record of the information that makes you up on the hope that it would be sufficient for future engineers to reconstruct some version of you. All they are claiming is that cryonic vitrification or aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation preserves in an information-theory sense the microstructure of the brain to sufficient detail that the connectome can be reconstructed by physically realizable scanning mechanisms, which we might not have now but are permitted by the laws of physics. That's a much weaker argument, but one which actually IS supported by actual scientific papers in the field. And it's all that cryonics organizations have ever argued for.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      > What they are claiming that they are preserving some record of the information that makes you up on the hope that it would be sufficient for future engineers to reconstruct some version of you. Yes, that's what they are claiming, but there is zero proof this is going to happen. In fact, given the long term stability of real world artifacts that are far more durable than dewar flasks there are substantial obstacles in the way of success here besides the non-viable scientific parts of it. The whole point is that this is a 'hope' about as useful as the hope that there is a heaven or a life after death. Death is final, until proven otherwise, and once if it is proven that it isn't we will know the pre-conditions required for successful preservation. Keep in mind that freezing the brain actually destroys it further, the resulting structures may look like they still preserve information when in fact they probably won't, just like a frozen and then thawed out steak still looks like the original but has structurally been completely altered. > All they are claiming is that cryonic vitrification or aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation preserves in an information-theory sense the microstructure of the brain to sufficient detail that the connectome can be reconstructed by physically realizable scanning mechanisms, which we might not have now but are permitted by the laws of physics. The laws of physics have little to do with it, it all depends on how much - if anything - of value is still present and recoverable from dead tissue. So far there is no proof that high level constructs such as memories and identity would be preserved through such a cycle. > That's a much weaker argument, but one which actually IS supported by actual scientific papers in the field. Actual scientific papers are not the equivalent of proof, they are merely the advancement of theories in the scientific sense, lacking - for now - evidence supporting those theories. Cryonics organizations are very careful to ride that fine line between selling hope and selling bull-shit. They have to because that's where the gullible nerds will be more than happy to part with their money. The short version of all this is: Hope Springs Eternal. And hope for an eternal life is common to Catholics looking for salvation, uploaders, cryogenic preservers and rapture kooks. And they all have another thing in common too: they all die anyway, just like everybody and everything else that is alive.
      - joefourier 8y ago
        Why do you have such a strong emotional hostility towards cryonics? First off, you don't understand how cryonics work, from the organizations to the procedure. It is not freezing, but vitrification, as anti-freeze is essentially pumped into the circulatory system to avoid the damage from icing you mentioned (toxicity of the anti-freeze is another problem). It may or may not work, but it is purely based in physical phenomena. Tissues, organs and simple organisms have been lowered to cryogenic temperature and then brought back, and extending that process to humans is not irrational. Animal brains have been vitrified and the structure of the connectome was still intact. The alternative to cryonics is for your brain to rot or be incinerated. Are you saying that the chances of reviving or reconstructing a well preserved, vitrified brain is the same as a pile of ashes? If so, that seems the more irrational point of view.
- malux85 8y ago
  I think the chances are close to zero - desiccation of the brain tissue destroys the proximal and distal dendrites and therefore the connections that represent our memories and consciousness. Freezing causes the water to expand and rupture the cell membranes, which also causes irreversible damage and information loss. I hope we can discover a better preservation technique until we get neural uploading sorted, I think we are closer than ever in history, and I'm optimistic!
  - garmaine 8y ago
    Freezing isn't used by anybody. Cryonics organizations use vitrification, which preserves the brain (and body) in a sort of liquid-glass state. The antifreeze used is massively toxic should the patient ever be warmed up, but at liquid-N2 temperatures it serves to preserve structure without the freezing damage you talk about, and nanotech-assisted recovery OR structural scanning would occur at that temperature. The newer techniques of room temperature preservation (with no hope of biological recovery, but very high hopes of structural preservation) apply structural scaffolding that keeps such neural microstructure in place, fossilizing the smallest relevant structures in a way a simple polish-and-scan destructive process can pick up, today. The latter point shows just how little jacquesm knows about this space. A rather large prize purse was recently won by a startup that preserved, through demonstrated scan-and-upload, a mammalian brain. Of course the brain-emulation software wasn't there to make a little VR mouse, but recovery of the brain's connectome was demonstrated.
1996 8y ago
No need to bring the brain back to life. When memories and the connectome are finally understood, simply scan the brain, even by destroying the original if needed: cut it into slices, scan it, then upload it to a robotic body, or even a simple computer simulation (good enough for me!) I do not want to be "flesh and bones" when we will have better alternatives. I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what we are? I can’t even express these things properly, because I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  > When memories and the connectome are finally understood IF. > simply scan the brain Simply? > I do not want to be "flesh and bones" when we will have better alternatives. IF. > Do you see the absurdity of what we are? We are no more absurd than your vision of what you wish to become, with the one note that we are what we are and your wishes will very likely remain just that. The whole cryogenics movement is strongly reminiscent of a religion: it costs lots of money, it makes vague promises of an afterlife and 'freethinkers' are relentlessly attacked by the true believers. Show me the proof, until then it's just another scam. > and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. There is some hot air involved here, but not that one.
  - 1996 8y ago
    If, if, if: yes I know, there is no guarantee. There is no proof. I make bets. There is little profit to be found where there is no risk involved. Immortality is just that biggest profit possible, for which many risks must be taken. You know what's worse than my bets: someone not making them. That person sure is never coming back when the body and brain rot and turns to dust. Anyway, if that is what you want, and you made an informed decision, I respect our differences
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
mysterypie 8y ago
Looking back ~125 years, if you said to the average person that we could identify him decades later from an object he touched, before the idea of fingerprint identification was well known, it would have sounded ridiculous. These days, decades old murders are solved with DNA -- hypothetically needing nothing more than a single cell. In both examples, we assumed simply that the information (fingerprints or DNA) was preserved. The technology for cryonic retrieval might be very far off, and the economics might not make sense, but if the mental information was preserved, then a possibility exists.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  > I don't get why people so dismissive about cryonics Lack of proof combined with zealotry. > The information is there, preserved maybe. And even if it is there that's a far cry from retrieving it, further from re-uploading it into something capable of making sense of that information, further still from getting something that becomes self-aware (and won't go instantly insane), and further than that from bringing the whole thing back to life. It is about as far from reality as the afterlife as peddled by religion at this point, with the caveat that maybe one day it will be done. But I wouldn't hold my breath. (Pun intended...). > Maybe it won't make economics sense to reconstruct the preserved minds. But it makes good economics sense to offer this 'service' to people who are gullible and aware of Pascal's wager. > But saying it's zero chance sounds very close to an argument for logical impossibility. It is very close to zero. So close that we might as well consider it an impossibility. It falls right into the 'wouldn't it be nice if' category of wishes. See also: Theranos and other bs along those lines. > Looking back ~125 years, if you said to the average person that we could identify him decades later from an object he touched, before the idea of fingerprint identification was well known, it would have sounded ridiculous. 1858 wants a word with you. > And today we know that you can uniquely identify a person and construct a model of his face from the DNA in a single microscopic cell. You are vastly over-selling the capabilities of the DNA facial reconstruction software as we have it today. It accounts for some double digit amount of variation. Even so, that at least has a chance of happening once you have enough information to factor in the effect of nourishment and aging. But the chances of abuse and false positive are so large that the only place where you'll see it used is missing person cases and cold case revival, and that's a good thing imo. > The info is there Sure, but that 'mere matter of engineering' in the middle is where the problem lies and given the challenges in any of the sub-steps required to make this a reality it is SF at best in the present and a scam at worst.
ALittleLight 8y ago
As a thought experiment, if you knew for certain that in a hundred years an individual who was long dead was brought back to life, and you had to guess whether the recently deceased was a cryogenic patient from 2018 or a mummified Emperor from antiquity - would you be ambivalent about the choices? If not, then you don't really think they're equally good paths to extra life.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- benchaney 8y ago
  Your logic divides by zero in this case.
- enjeyw 8y ago
  Your thought experiment got me thinking (which I guess is the point lol!): Imagine you knew for certain that in a couple hundred years individuals could be brought back to life at great expense, AND that it was at least 1/100th as feasible for mummified remains as it was for cryopreservation. Who do think scientists would put more effort into bringing back? Another 'Joe Blogs' from 2018, or a mummified Emperor from antiquity?
  - JoshTriplett 8y ago
    The former, because the difference in preservation methods make success far, far more likely. And as the process improves, the cost will decrease.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  Thought experiments of this kind are dissimilar to say Einstein fantasizing about elevators in that they do not yield insight over and beyond that which is already readily apparent. So rather than a thought experiment you should stick to real experiments and the experimental proof derived from there. As it sits today the mummy and the frozen patient are both dead as a doornail and nothing in present day science will bring them back. Keep in mind that if you want to play this game your best bet would be someone that's been freshly dead for about 20 minutes or so rather than the two cases you use to illustrate your point, and as long as that's not close to feasible the bet cryogenic people are making is really no different than believers sending their fortune to the church after death in order to be guaranteed a seat at the table in the afterlife. Religion masquerading as science is more disgusting to me than mere religion, at least the latter are somewhat transparent about it all being fairy tales and fiction.
visarga 8y ago
I'd rather have my experiences and actions (reactions) recorded for later. Even if we don't know how to upload a person now, we might know later. Recording is possible even now with the tech at our disposal. Deep Learning shows that you can build a model with enough input-output pairs. On a parallel topic - I think the data we are creating today, especially since the expansion of internet and sensors, might be used by future AGI to simulate the conditions that led to its creation for What-if scenarios & AGI pre-history. We might be in such a sim right now. Previous ages left too little information, so they can't be simulated as well. On the other hand, we leave tons of digital breadcrumbs, so we could be a prime target.
taejo 8y ago
0 and 1 are really extreme probabilities. It's often better to think of a probability of 0.001 being closer to 0.5 than to 0. As odds ratios it's easy to see that 999:1 is closer to 1:1 than to infinity:1. 0 probability means that even infinitely many pieces of evidence will not change your assessment: no matter how many heads you see restored from cryogenic storage, you will still believe that the probability is 0, and will have to find other, increasingly unlikely, explanations for the evidence. For a more in-depth and slightly more rigorous discussion, see 0 And 1 Are Not Probabilities: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QGkYCwyC7wTDyt3yT/0-and-1-are-not-probabilities https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QGkYCwyC7wTDyt3yT/0-and-1...
- Retric 8y ago
  0.001 is closer to 0 than 0.003 ;) All probability's have error bars, so 0 +/ 10e-20 is still very much 0.
  - taejo 8y ago
    Thanks, I can count :) Of course 0.001 is closer to 0 than 0.003, but my point is that linear distance is not a very good way of comparing probabilities-as-degrees-of-certainties: rather than differences of probabilities one should consider the ratios of odds ratios (or differences of log-odds-ratios) because these better represent how we update our certainty in the light of evidence. Frequentist probabilities can have error bars (if I repeat some experiment N times and observe no successes, I estimate the probability as "0 with error bars"), but I'm not sure that Bayesian probabilities-as-degrees-of-certainty naturally have error bars. If you're uncertain of your certainty, isn't that the same as just being less certain? As I say, I'm not sure of the mathematics here.
    - Retric 8y ago
      Bayesian has direct error bars and error bars on your error bars, and error bars on the ... It’s however generally ignored. Edit: I believe I preformed this experiment which updates my prior probability. Anyway, my point is not that you should interpret probability functions in a linear fashion just that non linear interpretations are not nessisarily more accurate. Suppose I am playing a chess I have non zero odds for a 2 win streak, but the odds of winning 1 googleplex games in a row is 0. Not becase it’s some probability ^ a googleplex but rather I am not going to play that many games. Sure, you might say their are some error bars on that zero, and error bars on those error bars etc, but still the direct estimate is still a 0 probability.

riffraff 8y ago

well, maybe. I don't know how chinese mummification worked, but Egyptian mummification removed the brain, which was considered something useless and generally evil or a source of problems (the soul is in the heart, right?)