Any summary report of probabilities is going to sound arbitrary in some sense. I’d prefer a norm that doesn’t demand an impossible standard of detail to state current views for every point, which discourages people from making themselves clear in this way. Instead, people who disagree for communicable reasons can challenge particular premises and the poster can engage on them. This role, of making beliefs explicit so as to focus discussion on productive areas, seems worth protecting.
I’d prefer a norm that doesn’t demand an impossible standard of detail to state current views for every point...
Fair enough, but surely there’s some room between “an impossible standard of detail” and “totally arbitrary”. I could very easily produce a table of probabilities similar to jkaufman’s (or, presumably, yours, if you have one) simply by rolling a d100 a bunch of times. Then, I’d multiply all the numbers together and proclaim, “ah hah, there’s a 1 in 234 chance that cryonics won’t work for me”. I think we can both agree, though, that such a process of assigning probabilities to events doesn’t have much predictive power.
So, can you suggest a better process ? How would you go about determining the probability of, say, “all people die” or “the cryonics company takes your money and runs”, or whatever ? Note, I’m not asking for a specific number (yet), but only for the process that you’d use to arrive at an estimate. Of course, I’d be interested in hearing about jkaufman’s method, as well.
Ok, that makes sense. I think it would be useful if you could annotate your list with references where possible, for things like the chance of Alzheimer’s, cancer, etc. This way people who disagree with your probabilities have something to go on. As for the rough guesses, I’m still unclear what they’re based on—can you elaborate ?
In addition, many of the items on your list depend on the time span. To use a trivial example, the probability of “all people die” approaches 1.0 as time goes on, culminating in the heat death of the Universe. Thus, it would be helpful if you provided the rough amount of time you expect to spend frozen, along with an explanation of why you picked this time span in particular.
Any summary report of probabilities is going to sound arbitrary in some sense. I’d prefer a norm that doesn’t demand an impossible standard of detail to state current views for every point, which discourages people from making themselves clear in this way. Instead, people who disagree for communicable reasons can challenge particular premises and the poster can engage on them. This role, of making beliefs explicit so as to focus discussion on productive areas, seems worth protecting.
Fair enough, but surely there’s some room between “an impossible standard of detail” and “totally arbitrary”. I could very easily produce a table of probabilities similar to jkaufman’s (or, presumably, yours, if you have one) simply by rolling a d100 a bunch of times. Then, I’d multiply all the numbers together and proclaim, “ah hah, there’s a 1 in 234 chance that cryonics won’t work for me”. I think we can both agree, though, that such a process of assigning probabilities to events doesn’t have much predictive power.
So, can you suggest a better process ? How would you go about determining the probability of, say, “all people die” or “the cryonics company takes your money and runs”, or whatever ? Note, I’m not asking for a specific number (yet), but only for the process that you’d use to arrive at an estimate. Of course, I’d be interested in hearing about jkaufman’s method, as well.
For some of the cases where I can look up data (chance of altzheimers, etc) I did so. For most of the other things I gave rough guesses.
Ok, that makes sense. I think it would be useful if you could annotate your list with references where possible, for things like the chance of Alzheimer’s, cancer, etc. This way people who disagree with your probabilities have something to go on. As for the rough guesses, I’m still unclear what they’re based on—can you elaborate ?
In addition, many of the items on your list depend on the time span. To use a trivial example, the probability of “all people die” approaches 1.0 as time goes on, culminating in the heat death of the Universe. Thus, it would be helpful if you provided the rough amount of time you expect to spend frozen, along with an explanation of why you picked this time span in particular.
Amen.
(I wish I could hyper-mega-upvote this.)