Personally, I don’t find any of the strategies you mention to be plausible enough to be worth thinking about for more than a few seconds. (Most of them seem obviously insufficient to preserve anything I would identify as “me.”) I’m worried this may produce the opposite of this post’s intended effect, because it may seem to provide evidence that strategies besides cryonics can be easily dismissed.
I think the plausibility of the arguments depends in a very great part on how plausible you think cryonics is; since the average on this site is about 22%, I can see how other strategies which are low likelihood/high payoff might appear almost not worth considering. On the other hand, something like ‘simulationist’ preservation seems to me to be well within two orders of magnitude of the probability of cryonics—both rely on society finding your information and deciding to do something with it, and both rely on the invention of technology which appears logically possible but well outside the realms of current science (overcome death vs overcome computational limits on simulations). But simulation preservation is three orders of magnitude cheaper than cryonics, which suggests to me that it might be worthwhile to consider. That is to say, if you seriously dismissed it in a couple of seconds you must have very very strong reasons to think the strategy is—say—about four orders of magnitude less likely than cryonics. What reason is that? I wonder if maybe I assumed the simulation problem was more widely accepted than I thought it might be. I’m a bit concerned about this line of reasoning, because all of my friends dismiss cryonics as ‘obviously not worth considering’ and I think they adopt this argument because the probabilistic conclusions are uncomfortable to contemplate.
With respect to your second point, that this post could be counter-productive, I am hugely interested by the conclusion. A priori it seems hugely unlikely that with all of our ingenuity we can only come up with two plausible strategies for living forever (religion and cryonics) and that both of those conclusions would be anathemic to the other group. If the ‘plausible strategy-space’ is not large I would take that as evidence that the strategy-space is in fact zero and people are just good at aggregating around plausible-but-flawed strategies. Can you think about any other major human accomplishment for which the strategy-space is so small? I suspect the conclusion for this is that I am bad at thinking up alternate strategies, rather than the strategies not existing, but it is an excellent point you make and well worth considering
something like ‘simulationist’ preservation seems to me to be well within two orders of magnitude of the probability of cryonics—both rely on society finding your information and deciding to do something with it
I don’t know if I agree with your estimate of the relative probabilities, but I admit that I exaggerated slightly to make my point. I agree that this strategy at least worth thinking about, especially if you think it is at all plausible that we are in a simulation. Something along these lines is the only one of the listed strategies that I thought had any merit.
A priori it seems hugely unlikely that with all of our ingenuity we can only come up with two plausible strategies for living forever (religion and cryonics)
I agree, and I also think we should try to think up other strategies. Here are some that people have already come up with besides cryonics and religion:
Figure out how to cure aging before you die.
Figure out how to upload brains before you die.
Create a powerful AI and delegate the problem to it (complementary to cryonics if the AI will only be created after you die).
This is an excellent comment, and it is extremely embarrassing for me that in a post on the plausible ‘live forever’ strategy space I missed three extremely plausible strategies for living forever, all of which are approximately complementary to cryonics (unless they’re successful, in which case; why would you bother). I’d like to take this as evidence that many eyes on the ‘live forever’ problem genuinely does result in utility increase, but I think it is a more plausible explanation that I’m not very good at visualising the strategy space!
Personally, I don’t find any of the strategies you mention to be plausible enough to be worth thinking about for more than a few seconds. (Most of them seem obviously insufficient to preserve anything I would identify as “me.”) I’m worried this may produce the opposite of this post’s intended effect, because it may seem to provide evidence that strategies besides cryonics can be easily dismissed.
I think the plausibility of the arguments depends in a very great part on how plausible you think cryonics is; since the average on this site is about 22%, I can see how other strategies which are low likelihood/high payoff might appear almost not worth considering. On the other hand, something like ‘simulationist’ preservation seems to me to be well within two orders of magnitude of the probability of cryonics—both rely on society finding your information and deciding to do something with it, and both rely on the invention of technology which appears logically possible but well outside the realms of current science (overcome death vs overcome computational limits on simulations). But simulation preservation is three orders of magnitude cheaper than cryonics, which suggests to me that it might be worthwhile to consider. That is to say, if you seriously dismissed it in a couple of seconds you must have very very strong reasons to think the strategy is—say—about four orders of magnitude less likely than cryonics. What reason is that? I wonder if maybe I assumed the simulation problem was more widely accepted than I thought it might be. I’m a bit concerned about this line of reasoning, because all of my friends dismiss cryonics as ‘obviously not worth considering’ and I think they adopt this argument because the probabilistic conclusions are uncomfortable to contemplate.
With respect to your second point, that this post could be counter-productive, I am hugely interested by the conclusion. A priori it seems hugely unlikely that with all of our ingenuity we can only come up with two plausible strategies for living forever (religion and cryonics) and that both of those conclusions would be anathemic to the other group. If the ‘plausible strategy-space’ is not large I would take that as evidence that the strategy-space is in fact zero and people are just good at aggregating around plausible-but-flawed strategies. Can you think about any other major human accomplishment for which the strategy-space is so small? I suspect the conclusion for this is that I am bad at thinking up alternate strategies, rather than the strategies not existing, but it is an excellent point you make and well worth considering
I don’t know if I agree with your estimate of the relative probabilities, but I admit that I exaggerated slightly to make my point. I agree that this strategy at least worth thinking about, especially if you think it is at all plausible that we are in a simulation. Something along these lines is the only one of the listed strategies that I thought had any merit.
I agree, and I also think we should try to think up other strategies. Here are some that people have already come up with besides cryonics and religion:
Figure out how to cure aging before you die.
Figure out how to upload brains before you die.
Create a powerful AI and delegate the problem to it (complementary to cryonics if the AI will only be created after you die).
This is an excellent comment, and it is extremely embarrassing for me that in a post on the plausible ‘live forever’ strategy space I missed three extremely plausible strategies for living forever, all of which are approximately complementary to cryonics (unless they’re successful, in which case; why would you bother). I’d like to take this as evidence that many eyes on the ‘live forever’ problem genuinely does result in utility increase, but I think it is a more plausible explanation that I’m not very good at visualising the strategy space!