The cryonics question is broken! I couldn’t answer it without suspecting it would be misleading. My p would be incredibly low but only because my p for the human species surviving is low. This is a technically correct way to answer the question but I am not at all confident that everyone else would answer literally, including the obvious consideration “if everyone else is dead, yeah, you die too”. Or, even if everyone did, I am not confident that the appropriate math would be done on a per-participant level in the results for the p(cryo) to be meaningful.
I answered that question interpreting it literally, even though “I’d assign probability 1% that a randomly-chosen person cryopreserved as of 1 Nov 2011 will be eventually revived” doesn’t imply “I think that approximately 1% of the people cryopreserved as of 1 Nov 2011 will be eventually revived”, since the probabilities for different people are nowhere near being uncorrelated.
I gave a low probability, not because I don’t think that reviving people is possible, or discoverable soon, but because I see some political trends today that I think are very likely to result in mobs destroying the facilities before we can be revived. (And even if that doesn’t happen, sooner or later some country is going to use nanotech in military ways, which—if the human race survives—may well result in the entire field being either banned or classified and staying that way.)
But I’m signed up, because it’s a bet I can’t lose.
How does that follow? Don’t you lose if you aren’t revived, be it because of social collapse, mobs unplugging you, or even just because you die in an informationally irrecoverable way?
The cryonics question is broken! I couldn’t answer it without suspecting it would be misleading. My p would be incredibly low but only because my p for the human species surviving is low. This is a technically correct way to answer the question but I am not at all confident that everyone else would answer literally, including the obvious consideration “if everyone else is dead, yeah, you die too”. Or, even if everyone did, I am not confident that the appropriate math would be done on a per-participant level in the results for the p(cryo) to be meaningful.
I answered that question interpreting it literally, even though “I’d assign probability 1% that a randomly-chosen person cryopreserved as of 1 Nov 2011 will be eventually revived” doesn’t imply “I think that approximately 1% of the people cryopreserved as of 1 Nov 2011 will be eventually revived”, since the probabilities for different people are nowhere near being uncorrelated.
FWIW, I factored the chances of cataclysm into my estimate.
This criticism also seems to apply to the existence of God, supernatural things, and etc.
I gave a low probability, not because I don’t think that reviving people is possible, or discoverable soon, but because I see some political trends today that I think are very likely to result in mobs destroying the facilities before we can be revived. (And even if that doesn’t happen, sooner or later some country is going to use nanotech in military ways, which—if the human race survives—may well result in the entire field being either banned or classified and staying that way.)
But I’m signed up, because it’s a bet I can’t lose.
How does that follow? Don’t you lose if you aren’t revived, be it because of social collapse, mobs unplugging you, or even just because you die in an informationally irrecoverable way?