The essence of analysis is to "break it down", to take apart vague wholes into clearer parts. For the same reasons we make point lists to help us make tough job decisions, or ask people who sue for damages to name an amount and break it into components, we should try to break down these important social claims via simple calculations. And the absence of attempts at this is a sad commentary on something. [
I understand the very basics of Present and future value, i.e., P.V = FV/(1+i)^t. 1) I have some questions in understanding what he is saying. According to the quote is every life year valued at 100k each? 2) is 2% the discount rate? what does it mean to discount 2% from future years from the moment you are revived.3) how many years is he factoring into his calculation?4) is the calculation then something like below if it takes 80 years to revive? me for a long life after? Summation(100k/(1+0.02)^80+98k/(1+0.02)^81)+ 96k/(1+0.02)^81)... until I die?) multiplied by 1/2 and 0.05?5) can you just provide me with a number by number multiplication so that I can puzzle it out from there?
> "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."
Can someone explain do me this calculation, more clearly? I am a noob.
Morally speaking, if you delay the advancement or adoption of a lifesaving technology, you are killing people. If you actually know about it, you are killing people deliberately.
So if you think cryonics is possible potentially, but we aren't there yet, you still have a moral obligation on grounds of common decency to support rapid research and adoption of cryonics.
So don't give me that "I'm a skeptic" garbage. This is and always has been about saving lives, not just our own but everybody's.
Robin's breakdown of the probability of being usefully revived after cryonics seems a lot like the type of reasoning used in the Drake equation to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilisations that we may encounter.
Does anyone here (Robin?) find the cryonics breakdown plausible but not the Drake equation?
Robin's 10 conditional probability items make sense to me. I just think he is far too optimistic about some of the probabilities. I say:
1. 99%, 2. 80%, 3. 95%, 4. .1%, 5. 5%, 6. 5%, 7. 10%, 8. 80%, 9. 90%, 10. 100%, Total: .0000135432%, around one-in-one-billion, which seems about right to me
"Brain science has workable input/output models of relevant brain cell types." In the words of Tyler, I'm just not there. And "Usual freezing quality preserved relevant model-needed details" seems pretty outlandish to me, too, but I say 5% to be deferential.
@jgm: You are basically saying that conjecture 3 has a low probability, but I think it is one of the most likely of the claims. If revival becomes possible, and the cost of revival is low, I can think of many reasons why people would be revived.
Someone might consider undertaking a more rigorous, better conditioned analysis of cryonics' NPV. Introducing and then taking the expectation on stochastic processes, while perhaps also permitting modest risk aversion that biases the NPV value upward taken as utility. (Two NPVs respectively.)
Something relatively short, and not so highly conditioned such that its' results remain minimally meaningful, supposing this is achievable with given information and time horizons.
Finally, this CBA-esque calculation ought to be motivated so that a reader can vaguely appreciate the author's own methods and biases.
Noise may overwhelm signal as others' have claimed, but at the margins we may be better informed by the exercise.
afu: Agreed, but surely there is some potential way to reverse these effects using a computer algorithm? Look for the connections that have been altered in these sorts of situations in the past and make the necessary adjustments before turning the upload "on".
As far as I'm concerned, #4 and #6 are the bottlenecking steps. What kind of resolution is necessary? That was one of the main questions considered in the "roadmap": http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/Rep..., and they obviously couldn't answer it adequately.
The likelihood of an anoxic brain injury is incredibly high at death. This makes me doubt if the probability of reconstructing the same consciousness from a frozen rises above 0. There is way to much noise in the system to make even make it worthwhile to try.
Robin, even if we thought that the probability of successful cryopreservation were 100%, it seems unlikely to be cost-effective. If you are right about emulations, the future doesn't need us: it will be cheaper to add additional life-years to the population without thawing us. Compared to cryonics, investments in existential risk reduction and even in global health would seem to have a lower cost per life-year saved/created. Do you believe that cryonics is the best use of your money and, if so, why?
So I would update my estimate of surviving issue #2 from .1296 to .162.
SInce I have a hard time estimating 3-8 I think I will follow Peco for those, since he seems to have independently estimated each one. That gets me to .00013, without considering the risk of civilization collapsing or the abstract "what is existence?" ones in 9 & 10.
Peter, I delayed responding to you until I could review that chapter again. It found that people asked to directly estimate aggregate events did better than people asked to estimate component events, even when they were forced to normalize their estimates. A striking finding, but just not the same as estimating a event by itself versus via component conditional probabilities.
Robin: If you make 50K$/yr now, and value life-years at twice your income, and discount future years at 2%I think for most humans utility calculations and time discounting don't work that way (just stating the matter of affairs, not arguing whether or not one should try to override them with econ.analysis).
sternhammer: Or a truck hits the power lines that feed the tanks.2c. Power outages. Lots of power outages don't lead to loss of buildings, but might thaw a head. How long can a tank stay cold without electricity?They don't liquefy nitrogen on-site, rather buy it from a commercial provider to refill every few weeks. According to Alcor a tank left unattended will boil off in 90 days or more.
peco: 0.02%Please name another immortality wager that you estimate has these or better chances of success, costs as much or less and is not mutually exclusive with cryonics so that I can also examine if I should put it on my to-buy list.
1. If 'sims' become successful, there doesn't seem to be a historical (i.e. non-emotional) need to resurrect anyone. So chances are, dph's argument about exceptional characters being most likely to be resurrected falls flat.
2. Would 'em's be socially productive entities? If not, what percentage of tax money would go into supporting these 'em's? What if a resurrected 'em' committed suicide? How would the law in 2090 address that?
Retracted my comment.
I understand the very basics of Present and future value, i.e., P.V = FV/(1+i)^t. 1) I have some questions in understanding what he is saying. According to the quote is every life year valued at 100k each? 2) is 2% the discount rate? what does it mean to discount 2% from future years from the moment you are revived.3) how many years is he factoring into his calculation?4) is the calculation then something like below if it takes 80 years to revive? me for a long life after? Summation(100k/(1+0.02)^80+98k/(1+0.02)^81)+ 96k/(1+0.02)^81)... until I die?) multiplied by 1/2 and 0.05?5) can you just provide me with a number by number multiplication so that I can puzzle it out from there?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
> "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."
Can someone explain do me this calculation, more clearly? I am a noob.
Morally speaking, if you delay the advancement or adoption of a lifesaving technology, you are killing people. If you actually know about it, you are killing people deliberately.
So if you think cryonics is possible potentially, but we aren't there yet, you still have a moral obligation on grounds of common decency to support rapid research and adoption of cryonics.
So don't give me that "I'm a skeptic" garbage. This is and always has been about saving lives, not just our own but everybody's.
Robin's breakdown of the probability of being usefully revived after cryonics seems a lot like the type of reasoning used in the Drake equation to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilisations that we may encounter.
Does anyone here (Robin?) find the cryonics breakdown plausible but not the Drake equation?
Robin's 10 conditional probability items make sense to me. I just think he is far too optimistic about some of the probabilities. I say:
1. 99%, 2. 80%, 3. 95%, 4. .1%, 5. 5%, 6. 5%, 7. 10%, 8. 80%, 9. 90%, 10. 100%, Total: .0000135432%, around one-in-one-billion, which seems about right to me
"Brain science has workable input/output models of relevant brain cell types." In the words of Tyler, I'm just not there. And "Usual freezing quality preserved relevant model-needed details" seems pretty outlandish to me, too, but I say 5% to be deferential.
@jgm: You are basically saying that conjecture 3 has a low probability, but I think it is one of the most likely of the claims. If revival becomes possible, and the cost of revival is low, I can think of many reasons why people would be revived.
Someone might consider undertaking a more rigorous, better conditioned analysis of cryonics' NPV. Introducing and then taking the expectation on stochastic processes, while perhaps also permitting modest risk aversion that biases the NPV value upward taken as utility. (Two NPVs respectively.)
Something relatively short, and not so highly conditioned such that its' results remain minimally meaningful, supposing this is achievable with given information and time horizons.
Finally, this CBA-esque calculation ought to be motivated so that a reader can vaguely appreciate the author's own methods and biases.
Noise may overwhelm signal as others' have claimed, but at the margins we may be better informed by the exercise.
Tyler posts that this comment thread is excellent. :)
afu: Agreed, but surely there is some potential way to reverse these effects using a computer algorithm? Look for the connections that have been altered in these sorts of situations in the past and make the necessary adjustments before turning the upload "on".
As far as I'm concerned, #4 and #6 are the bottlenecking steps. What kind of resolution is necessary? That was one of the main questions considered in the "roadmap": http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/Rep..., and they obviously couldn't answer it adequately.
The likelihood of an anoxic brain injury is incredibly high at death. This makes me doubt if the probability of reconstructing the same consciousness from a frozen rises above 0. There is way to much noise in the system to make even make it worthwhile to try.
Robin, even if we thought that the probability of successful cryopreservation were 100%, it seems unlikely to be cost-effective. If you are right about emulations, the future doesn't need us: it will be cheaper to add additional life-years to the population without thawing us. Compared to cryonics, investments in existential risk reduction and even in global health would seem to have a lower cost per life-year saved/created. Do you believe that cryonics is the best use of your money and, if so, why?
Anonymous,
Thanks, I didn't know that. That's helpful.
So I would update my estimate of surviving issue #2 from .1296 to .162.
SInce I have a hard time estimating 3-8 I think I will follow Peco for those, since he seems to have independently estimated each one. That gets me to .00013, without considering the risk of civilization collapsing or the abstract "what is existence?" ones in 9 & 10.
Peter, I delayed responding to you until I could review that chapter again. It found that people asked to directly estimate aggregate events did better than people asked to estimate component events, even when they were forced to normalize their estimates. A striking finding, but just not the same as estimating a event by itself versus via component conditional probabilities.
Robin: If you make 50K$/yr now, and value life-years at twice your income, and discount future years at 2%I think for most humans utility calculations and time discounting don't work that way (just stating the matter of affairs, not arguing whether or not one should try to override them with econ.analysis).
sternhammer: Or a truck hits the power lines that feed the tanks.2c. Power outages. Lots of power outages don't lead to loss of buildings, but might thaw a head. How long can a tank stay cold without electricity?They don't liquefy nitrogen on-site, rather buy it from a commercial provider to refill every few weeks. According to Alcor a tank left unattended will boil off in 90 days or more.
peco: 0.02%Please name another immortality wager that you estimate has these or better chances of success, costs as much or less and is not mutually exclusive with cryonics so that I can also examine if I should put it on my to-buy list.
1. If 'sims' become successful, there doesn't seem to be a historical (i.e. non-emotional) need to resurrect anyone. So chances are, dph's argument about exceptional characters being most likely to be resurrected falls flat.
2. Would 'em's be socially productive entities? If not, what percentage of tax money would go into supporting these 'em's? What if a resurrected 'em' committed suicide? How would the law in 2090 address that?