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1. Pascal's Wager isn't comparable here for a number of reasons. You're probably thinking of the reasoning some people give that a finite but humongous expected

• philwelch 15y ago
  > Pascal's Wager isn't comparable here for a number of reasons. Please provide them. > Hence my own estimate of at least 5%. (I believe I originally got that figure in my head back from http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/03/break-cryonics-down.ht.. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/03/break-cryonics-down.ht.... -- I don't think it's an unreasonable one.) I guess if you invent a few data figures and then do math on them, you can get an aggregate of your own opinion. It's like the Drake equation, except at least with the Drake equation there are some terms we actually know. > It's still a better shot than being buried or cremated and worth it given the low prices available today. Every dollar you pay for cryonics is a dollar that you're depriving your actual living children or family members, or it's a dollar you're depriving yourself of in the past modulo time value of money. > Cryonics is a pretty poor business to be in if you're a charlatan. Where are you getting that vibe from? It's the perfect business to be in if you're a charlatan! There's no way to tell if you're doing a good job or a bad job, you never have to provide any results (because those happen in the distant and undefined future), and your customers are already dead. > I'm not going to touch your horrid comment that death is somehow necessary for progress.... Cryophobia is pure evil. It makes people choose death instead of cryonics. Maybe it is horrid, but is it true? Ah, you don't even bother addressing that. Because as we all know, the most rational response to an argument is to accuse your opponent of "evil". It seems to me that even if you dress it up in science fiction and call it "rationality", religion is still religion.
  • makomk 15y ago
    To be fair, there's only been one example of complete freezer failure at a cryonics firm that we know of, but one failure is enough if your corpse was being preserved at that firm. (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/354/mistakes-were-made http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/354/m...)
  • Jach 15y ago
    The main reason: the decision matrix for Pascal's Wager introduces infinities; the many various ones you can construct for cryonics to win do not. (I suppose you could construct one with infinities, though I can't say I've ever seen one, and I don't think that construction would be tenable anyway.) Another: the fact that there are many constructs for cryonics decision matrices--Pascal's Wager is static in time, a "Cryonic's Wager" would be dynamic in time. Another: cryonics doesn't suppose anything supernatural--if cryonics can or can't work, there are physical reasons why, we don't just have to suppose the outcomes as baseless entities. Perhaps you should explain why you think Pascal's Wager is analogous here. We're dealing with subjective probabilities representing confidence in prediction, so yes, we can do math on them and say "If you believe this, you must believe that if you want to be consistent." Even if all cryonics estimates are ultimately that person's prior (suggesting there is no additional information currently to update a person's estimate of cryonics working given their background information, something I think is false), we can still reason about different values. If you think cryonics has epsilon chance of working, fine, it's not for you, and under the assumption that it doesn't work I'd agree no one should do it, but I don't think cryonics has epsilon chance of working, and I don't think it's just my prior. A secondary assumption we might make is that the future world would become horrible with us introduced to it. If we knew it would, then we know we'll never be revived, and I'd agree no one should bother with cryonics. Since we don't know that, you can factor it in as a part of your uncertainty about being revived, which is a part of your uncertainty about "cryonics working". > Every dollar you pay for cryonics is a dollar that you're depriving your actual living children or family members, or it's a dollar you're depriving yourself of in the past modulo time value of money. Yes... and? Every dollar you pay for "X" fits that. Do you think "This $10 could go to my friend" every time you spend $10? So what to do? The linked post, at the end, suggests a dollar-value you can assign if you only think "cryonics working" has a 5% chance: "If you make 50K$/yr now, and value life-years at twice your income, and discount future years at 2% from the moment you are revived for a long life, but only discount that future life based on the chance it will happen, times a factor of 1/2 because you only half identify with this future creature, then the present value of a 5% chance of revival is $125,000, which is about the most expensive cryonics price now." (And cryonics can be had for as little as $40k, more or less.) This isn't quite mathsturbation, since it's legitimate if in fact you match the stated assumptions. > There's no way to tell if you're doing a good job or a bad job Not true. You can rate cryonics businesses by how effective their vitrification methods are, how quick they are about it, how many patients they've lost due to any cause, whether they do any research into improving their methods as well as the currently unsolved problem of reversing it, how long they've been around, how well their facilities can resist natural disasters like earthquakes, and probably a bunch of other ways. Furthermore the market for cryonics is still very small; you stand to make a lot more money more easily doing other things, whether you're a charlatan or not. (For example releasing yet another homeopathic sleep inducer.) Regarding your horrid comment, I'll explicitly say it's horrid and most likely untrue (but feel free to factor it into your uncertainty about "cryonics working"). If you're not going to bother defending that one, I'm not going to bother arguing against that one. I thought the "evil" comment was interesting since the author noted it's not meant as a useful argument, it's meant as a response to useless ones. Which is what this has been. In your original comment "2" was the closest thing to an actually useful discussion point--how likely is it that enough brain information is there after vitrification? If you want to think of yourself as evil, go ahead, I wouldn't go that far but it's an interesting thought. Especially considering it from the perspective of living to 2070 (when I'll be 80), imagining that it turns out to be the year we successfully revive and fix whatever would have killed the first cryonics patient suspended in, say, 2000. Don't conflate religion with religious thinking, and religious thinking with magical thinking, and magical thinking with bad thinking. While religious and magical thinking are both subsets of bad thinking, there are other forms, and they're all distinct from religion itself. (As an example of another issue where this "You're just a religion too!" criticism has been misused in relation to the idea of a technological singularity, see http://web.archive.org/web/20101227190553/http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/steven/?p=21 http://web.archive.org/web/20101227190553/http://www.acceler... )