No, this is just what they aren’t saying! Their position is emphatically not “I am confident that cryonics won’t work”. To simplify, let me treat “confident” as if it denoted an exact probability boundary. Then To us, the only possibilities are that either you’re confident it won’t work, or you’re not confident it won’t work, in which case you assign a probability to it working significantly greater than zero; and if your position is the latter then signing up makes sense. But neither of these are their position: they don’t know whether it’ll work or not, they are not making a confident assertion, but they’re saying that the evidence doesn’t suffice to move us from the “I don’t know” position to a position where we think it has a significant chance of working. They would absolutely reject any characterisation of their position as making a confident assertion.
No, the post is not about believing high-probability events to be avoidable.
But it does seem to be saying “there’s not a chance”.
No, this is just what they aren’t saying! Their position is emphatically not “I am confident that cryonics won’t work”. To simplify, let me treat “confident” as if it denoted an exact probability boundary. Then To us, the only possibilities are that either you’re confident it won’t work, or you’re not confident it won’t work, in which case you assign a probability to it working significantly greater than zero; and if your position is the latter then signing up makes sense. But neither of these are their position: they don’t know whether it’ll work or not, they are not making a confident assertion, but they’re saying that the evidence doesn’t suffice to move us from the “I don’t know” position to a position where we think it has a significant chance of working. They would absolutely reject any characterisation of their position as making a confident assertion.