Rationality, Cryonics and Pascal's Wager

Does this apply to legal assisted suicide within the US as well?

I always vote down comments that say "I'll be voted down for this, but..."

Why did you have to add the last bit? You were making a good point!

It sounds like there may be a great point in here. I can't quite see what it is or whether it works, though. Could you maybe spell it out with some variables or math?

Suppose you have a prima facie utility function U on ordinary outcomes; and suppose that you estimate that due to unknown unknowns, the probability that your real utility function V is infinite for each ordinary outcome is 1/(10^100) * U(outcome). Then you should prefer eating a pie with U = 3 utils (versus say 1 util for not eating it) to an 1 in 10^200 chance of going to heaven and getting infinite utils (which I'm counting here as an extraordinary outcome that the relationship between U and V doesn't apply to).

If we use "decide rationally" to mean "decide in the way that makes most sense, given our limited knowledge and understanding" rather than "follow a particular procedure with a certain sort of justification", I don't think this is true.

I'm confused here, but I'm thinking of cases like: there's a probability of 1 in 10^20 that God exists, but if so then our best guess is also that 1=2. If God exists, then the utility of an otherwise identical outcome is (1/1)^1000 times what it would otherwise be, so it's also (1/2)^1000 times what it would otherwise be, so can we ignore that case?

I suspect reasoning like this would produce cutoffs far below Roko's, though. (And the first argument above probably wouldn't reproduce normal behavior.)

IAWYC (I think my original statement is wrong), but I disagree on there being no difference in 'accurate' and 'inaccurate' probabilities.

In my mind there's a big difference between a probability where you have one step between the data and your probability(such as a lottery or a coin flip), and a case where you have multiple, fuzzy inferential steps (such as an estimation of the longevity of the human race). The more you have to extrapolate out and fill in the gaps where you don't have data, the more room there is for error to creep in.

For things in the realm of 'things that will happen in the far future', it's not clear to me that a probability you assign to something will be anything but speculation, and as such I'd assign any probability (no matter what it is) for that type of event a rather low accuracy.

This raises the question of whether it's worth it at all to assign probabilities to these kinds of events where there are too many unknown (and unknown unknown) factors influencing them. (and if I'm terribly misunderstanding something, please let me know.)

When dealing with health and safety decisions, people often need to deal with one-in-a-million types of risks.

In nuclear safety, I hear, they use a measure called "nanomelts" or a one-in-a-billion risk of a meltdown. They then can rank risks based on cost-to-fix per nanomelt, for example.

In both of these, though, it might be more based on data and then scaled down to different timescales (e.g. if there were 250 deaths per year in the US from car accidents = about 1 in a million per day risk of death from driving; use statistical techniques to adjust this number for age, drunkenness, etc.)

There's something wrong with an analysis that biases the outcome in a particular direction as you add more details. In this case, the more different kinds of things that might go wrong or have to go right, the more fractions you have to multiply your result by. I don't know how to get out of this trap, but it seems a failure mode with any attempt to predict the future by multiplying lists of probabilities, each generated by a handwave.

The only one of your numbers that I think can be estimated based on current experience is #2. Alcor publishes details regularly about how their cryopreservations go, and numbers for how many members quit or die in circumstances that make their preservation hopeless. Your 80% number sounds like it's in the right ballpark. (*)

My other complaint is that your numbers are connected by a more complicated web of conditional likelihoods and interactions than simple multiplication shows. If civilization survives, the likelihood of particular technologies being developed increases, and if organizations like Alcor persist, that ought to raise those odds as well. In many of the bad societal outcomes, you won't get revived. This reduces your downside almost as much as it reduces your upside. You've still paid for suspension, but it doesn't count as a hell scenario.

I don't think "Shut up and Multiply" should be taken literally here.

(*) ETA: simpleton's reference to Alcor's numbers says I'm wrong about this.

I was surprised you'd give the human race so low a chance as a coin-flip.

I think the reason Roko puts it so low - and at the probability one gives when one doesn't know either way - is because there are so many current existential risks like nuclear warfare, pandemics, asteroids, supervolcanoes, and there are multiple existential risks which could become a concern between now and when cryo-resurrection is feasible (grey goo-level nanotech is a plausible prerequisite for resurrection, and equally plausible candidate for destroying humanity, to say nothing of AI risks).

I've actually had people email me and tell me off for putting our chances of survival too high. They cite the AGI risk as contributing most of the risk.

But we can't talk about this at the moment.

Maybe I didn't understand what you were saying about quantum immortality, then. Let's make it a bit more explicit. To avoid confusion let's ignore (1) other copies of you that exist merely because the universe is very large, if any, (2) simulations of you that exist for any reason at all, if any, and (3) the possibility that you might escape death without either cryonics or extreme good luck, for instance because of a technological singularity in the near future.

1. Ignoring many-worlds quantum stuff:

Without cryonics, you will almost certainly die within the next (say) 100 years, but there is an infinitesimally tiny chance that you will somehow survive much longer.

With cryonics, you will certainly "die" (that is, go through something that greatly resembles death up to and beyond the point at which you cease to be conscious), and then there's some chance (whose size is debatable) that you will later be revived.

Comparing these two outcomes, you should decline to bother with cryonics (even if its costs are very low) if (a) you think the chance of getting revived is very tiny, or (b) what matters to you is having some chance of survival rather than having as much chance of survival as possible.

2. With many-worlds quantum stuff:

Every statement that used to be about probability now gets a reinterpretation in terms of (speaking loosely) "number of versions of you". If you toss a coin, roughly half of your versions see it come up heads and roughly half see it come up tails. If you play Russian roulette with a six-shooter, roughly 5/6 of your versions live and roughly 1/6 die.

So you should feel exactly the same way about "proportion of versions of me for which X is true" as you do about "probability that X is true for me".

Now:

Without cryonics, almost all your versions die within (say) 100 years. An infinitesimally tiny fraction of them get "lucky" and live much longer.

With cryonics, all your versions "die", and then some (debatable how large) fraction get revived later.

Comparing these two outcomes, you should decline to bother with cryonics (even if its costs are very low) if (a) you think the fraction of versions-of-you that get revived is very tiny, or (b) what matters to you is having some copy of you survive rather than having as many copies survive as possible.

And, once again: if you take many-worlds seriously -- which you have to, for "quantum immortality" to make any sense -- then you should feel exactly the same way about this as you did about the corresponding comparison stated in terms of probabilities: because that's what probabilities (of the "objective" sort) are. Probability of survival == fraction of Everett branches on which you survive.

If you're happy for your survival to depend on quantum immortality, then you should also be happy for it to depend on a coin toss or the result of a game of Russian roulette. If quantum immortality doesn't lessen your reluctance to bet your life in those ways, then it also shouldn't make a difference to your feelings about cryonics.

Due to QM the function is many-to-one and can't be reversed. If you isolate a single Everett branch and look only at that branch and not all the other branches, and run that branch backward in time, it will evolve into a multiplicity of pasts (that would in the greater scheme be coherently canceled out by the past evolution of other branches). The upshot is that even if you timeslice the entire future lightcone in a single branch you cannot get the exact past. And we can't get photons that have escaped over the horizon, so we can't get the whole future lightcone anyway, and small divergences will amplify, and the whole thing would require more computing power than all the particles we're trying to run back.

And a time camera using new physics violates the character of known physical law, in particular its elegant locality, that each element of reality only interacts with immediate neighbors.

It's too early to give up hope. But as a working assumption, the dead are dead.

For most people in the past, we have no footprints, bits of writing, etc. A crude back-of-envelope calculation suggests that maybe it takes ~ 10^15 bits to describe one person's brain; I wouldn't be surprised to find that wrong by a couple of orders of magnitude, but in any case it's rather a lot. Anyone who's (1) in the not-very-recent past and (2) not exceptional in the traces they leave behind has left only very subtle such traces -- which will be tied up in computationally intractable ways with everyone else's very subtle traces, and with all kinds of extraneous cruft. I've no idea what might turn out to be possible in principle, and saying "we'll never have the technology to do X" doesn't have a great track record of success ... but I wouldn't hold out much hope of being able to retrieve enough information to reconstruct past people even with future-lightcone-scanning technologies, never mind without.