in a conjunctive case, such as cryonics, the more finely the necessary steps are broken down, the lower you can manipulate a naive estimate.
Except that people intuitively average these sorts of links, so hostile manipulation involves negating the conjunction and then turning it into a disjunction—please, dear reader, assign a probability to not-A, and not-B, and not-C—oh, look, the probability of A and B and C seems quite low now! If you were describing an actual conjunction, a Dark Arts practioner would manipulate it in favor of cryonics by zooming in and dwelling on links of great strength. To hostilely drive down the intuitive probability of a conjunction, you have to break it down into lots and lots of possible failure modes—which is of course the strategy practiced by people who prefer to drive down the probability of cryonics. (Motivation is shown by their failure to cover any disjunctive success modes.)
Except that people intuitively average these sorts of links, so hostile manipulation involves negating the conjunction and then turning it into a disjunction—please, dear reader, assign a probability to not-A, and not-B, and not-C—oh, look, the probability of A and B and C seems quite low now! If you were describing an actual conjunction, a Dark Arts practioner would manipulate it in favor of cryonics by zooming in and dwelling on links of great strength. To hostilely drive down the intuitive probability of a conjunction, you have to break it down into lots and lots of possible failure modes—which is of course the strategy practiced by people who prefer to drive down the probability of cryonics. (Motivation is shown by their failure to cover any disjunctive success modes.)