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Bindbreaker comments on Normal Cryonics - Less Wrong
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Suppose your child dies. Afterward, everyone alive at the time of an unFriendly intelligence explosion plus the tiny handful signed up for cryonics (including your child), also dies. Would you say in retrospect that you'd been a bad parent, or would you plead that, in retrospect, you made the best possible decision given the information that you had?
I, personally, will allocate any resources that I would otherwise use for cryonics to the prevention of existential risks.
I have no child; this is not coincidence. If I did have a kid you can damn well better believe that kid would be signed up for cryonics or I wouldn't be able to sleep.
I'll accept that excuse for your not being signed up yourself - though I'm rather skeptical until I see the donation receipt. I will not accept that excuse for your child not being signed up. I'll accept it as an excuse for not having a child, but not as an excuse for having a child and then not signing them up for cryonics. Take it out of the movie budget, not the existential risks budget.
I don't believe in excuses, I believe that signing up for cryonics is less rational than donating to prevent existential risks. For somewhat related reasons, I do not intend to have children.
Sounds like you could be in a consistent state of heroism, then. May I ask to which existential risk(s) you are currently donating?
I'm in the "amassing resources" phase at present. Part of the reason I'm on this site is to try and find out what organizations are worth donating to.
I am in no way a hero. I'm just a guy who did the math, and at least part of my motivation is selfish anyway.
I strongly advise you to immediately start donating something to somewhere, even if it's $10/year to Methuselah. If there's one thing you learn working in the nonprofit world, it's that people who donated last year are likely to also donate this year, and people who last year planned to donate "next year" will this year be planning to donate "next year".
Upon hearing this advice, I just donated $10 to SIAI, even though I consider this amount totally insignificant relative to my expected future donations. I will upvote anyone who does the same for any transhumanist charity.
Way to turn correlation-causality correlation into causality
Do you have an estimate of how much a new donor to SIAI is worth above and beyond their initial donation? How about given that I ask them to donate with money they were about to repay me anyway?
If it's significant it could be well worth the social capital to spread your own donations among non-donor friends.
I plan to donate once I have X dollars of nonessential income, and yes, I have a specific value for X.
Did your calculations for X take into account discounting at 0-10%? Money for research years from now does much less good than money now.
No-- thanks for the tip! I will adjust my calculations accordingly.
Or the cost of the research being delayed.
I figured that was covered by 'much less good'; there are a lot of costs to delaying, if we wanted to enumerate them - risks of good charities going under, inflation and catastrophic economic events gnawing away at one's stored value, the ever-present existential risks each year, etc.
Antiakrasia, future-self-influencing recommendation: if you can afford $10/year today, make sure your current level of giving is not zero.