X-Message-Number: 8402 From: Ralph Merkle <> Subject: Estimating the probability of success of cryonics Date: Sat, 19 Jul 1997 14:19:23 PDT I tried to post this a few days ago, but it seems not to have made it. ----------------------------- Periodically, someone posts an analysis of the form Probability of success = probability of event 1 x probability of event 2 x . . . probability of event n While this approach is entirely reasonable in the abstract, it is only valid when the different events are independent. Usually, however, the events listed are correlated in various ways, resulting in a serious error in the overall estimate. For example, if two events are: government allows revival and not put in zoo we see that there is a likely correlation. If, for example, after the successful revival of people in cryonic suspension the Supreme Court rules that they have the same rights they had prior to suspension, then the government would be more likely to block attempts to put you in a zoo. Similarly, the items will awake without dire pain and my cryonics organization is willing to revive me are also correlated. If there is a significant probability of waking in dire pain, the cryonics organization will likely conclude that further research is required and that those in suspension should not be revived until the problem of dire pain is solved. My experience is that lists with more than three or four items suffer from severe correlations, which invalidates the simple multiplicative estimate of the total probability of success. In general, cryonics will fail only if: 1) Information theoretic death occurs at some point in time 2) Technologies that are feasible in principle are never applied in practice. In addition, it is theoretically possible that cryonics could be a technical success but would still be undesired if, on waking, you found that being dead was preferable to being alive. We could therefore add a third item: 3) I don't like the result. Even this short list suffers from correlations. For example, unsatisfactory results (item 3) could be caused by failure to apply appropriate methods (item 2). Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=8402