= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Normal Cryonics
I recently attended a small gathering whose purpose was to let young people signed up for cryonics meet older people signed up for cryonics - a matter of some concern to the old guard, for obvious reasons.
The young cryonicists' travel was subsidized. I suspect this led to a greatly different selection filter than usually prevails at conferences of what Robin Hanson would call "contrarians". At an ordinary conference of transhumanists - or libertarians, or atheists - you get activists who want to meet their own kind, strongly enough to pay conference fees and travel expenses. This conference was just young people who took the action of signing up for cryonics, and who were willing to spend a couple of paid days in Florida meeting older cryonicists.
The gathering was 34% female, around half of whom were single, and a few kids. This may sound normal enough, unless you've been to a lot of contrarian-cluster conferences, in which case you just spit coffee all over your computer screen and shouted "WHAT?" I did sometimes hear "my husband persuaded me to sign up", but no more frequently than "I pursuaded my husband to sign up". Around 25% of the people present were from the computer world, 25% from science, and 15% were doing something in music or entertainment - with possible overlap, since I'm working from a show of hands.
I was expecting there to be some nutcases in that room, people who'd signed up for cryonics for just the same reason they subscribed to homeopathy or astrology, i.e., that it sounded cool. None of the younger cryonicists showed any sign of it. There were a couple of older cryonicists who'd gone strange, but none of the young ones that I saw. Only three hands went up that did not identify as atheist/agnostic, and I think those also might have all been old cryonicists. (This is surprising enough to be worth explaining, considering the base rate of insanity versus sanity. Maybe if you're into woo, there is so much more woo that is better optimized for being woo, that no one into woo would give cryonics a second glance.)
The part about actually signing up may also be key - that's probably a ten-to-one or worse filter among people who "get" cryonics. (I put to Bill Faloon of the old guard that probably twice as many people had died while planning to sign up for cryonics eventually, than had actually been suspended; and he said "Way more than that.") Actually signing up is an intense filter for Conscientiousness, since it's mildly tedious (requires multiple copies of papers signed and notarized with witnesses) and there's no peer pressure.
For whatever reason, those young cryonicists seemed really normal - except for one thing, which I'll get to tomorrow. Except for that, then, they seemed like very ordinary people: the couples and the singles, the husbands and the wives and the kids, scientists and programmers and sound studio technicians.
At some future point I ought to post on the notion of belief hysteresis, where you get locked into whatever belief hits you first. So it had previously occurred to me (though I didn't write the post) to argue for cryonics via a conformity reversal test:
If you found yourself in a world where everyone was signed up for cryonics as a matter of routine - including everyone who works at your office - you wouldn't be the first lonely dissenter to earn the incredulous stares of your coworkers by unchecking the box that kept you signed up for cryonics, in exchange for an extra $300 per year.
(Actually it would probably be a lot cheaper, more like $30/year or a free government program, with that economy of scale; but we should ignore that for purposes of the reversal test.)
The point being that if cryonics were taken for granted, it would go on being taken for granted; it is only the state of non-cryonics that is unstable, subject to being disrupted by rational argument.
And this cryonics meetup was that world. It was the world of the ordinary scientists and programmers and sound studio technicians who had signed up for cryonics as a matter of simple common sense.
It tears my heart out.
Those young cryonicists weren't heroes. Most of the older cryonicists were heroes, and of course there were a couple of other heroes among us young folk, like a former employee of Methuselah who'd left to try to put together a startup/nonprofit around a bright idea he'd had for curing cancer (note: even I think this is an acceptable excuse). But most of the younger cryonicists weren't there to fight a desperate battle against Death, they were people who'd signed up for cryonics because it was the obvious thing to do.
And it tears my heart out, because I am a hero and this was like seeing a ray of sunlight from a normal world, some alternate Everett branch of humanity where things really were normal instead of crazy all the goddamned time, a world that was everything this world could be and isn't.
Then there were the children, some of whom had been signed up for cryonics since the day they were born.
It tears my heart out. I'm having trouble remembering to breathe as I write this. My own little brother isn't breathing and never will again.
You know what? I'm going to come out and say it. I've been unsure about saying it, but after attending this event, and talking to the perfectly ordinary parents who signed their kids up for cryonics like the goddamn sane people do, I'm going to come out and say it: If you don't sign up your kids for cryonics then you are a lousy parent.
If you aren't choosing between textbooks and food, then you can afford to sign up your kids for cryonics. I don't know if it's more important than a home without lead paint, or omega-3 fish oil supplements while their brains are maturing, but it's certainly more important than you going to the movies or eating at nice restaurants. That's part of the bargain you signed up for when you became a parent. If you can afford kids at all, you can afford to sign up your kids for cryonics, and if you don't, you are a lousy parent. I'm just back from an event where the normal parents signed their normal kids up for cryonics, and that is the way things are supposed to be and should be, and whatever excuses you're using or thinking of right now, I don't believe in them any more, you're just a lousy parent.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (930)
I was going to leave a comment simply stating:
"Eliezer Yudkowsky - the man who can make a blatantly off-topic post and be upvoted for it."
But it occurs to me I might be missing something, so explanation please.
Signing up for cryonics is kind of the textbook example of applied rationality around here, much as theism is the textbook example of applied irrationality, so I think it's interesting to know what kind of people did it, and why.
Quibble: "theism" itself isn't so much applied irrationality - that would be something more like wasting time at church, or buying lottery tickets - an action with a tangible cost.
There's a final filter in rationality where you take your ideas seriously, and a critical sub-filter is where you're willing to take ideas seriously even though the people around you don't.
Going to a group where cryonics was normal was a shift of perspective even for me, and here I thought I had conformity beat. It was what caused me to realize - no, parents who don't sign their kids up for cryonics really are doing something inexcusable; the mistake is not inevitable, it's just them.
Anything specific you can share?
I'm thinking about mentioning cryo to a few people, and am curious to know what kind of reaction to expect.
I second Michael's question
This is a sly way of still saying that but not taking the karma hit. (Upvoted, btw)
Proslepsis.
Learning new very-specific words that completely nail a phenomenon I'm trying to describe is something I really enjoy, and it doesn't happen too often. Thanks!
My pleasure. (It was a joint effort: my vague recollection that there was a term that means "mentioning without mentioning" plus Google equals... a lot of karma points, apparently.)
Well, crap. That's something I hadn't even thought of yet.
I'm currently struggling with actually signing up for cryonics myself so this angle hadn't even crossed my mind.
I'll face very strong opposition from my wife, family, and friends when I finally do sign up. I can't imagine what kind of opposition I'll face when I attempt to sign my 3-month old daughter up.
I've been planning a top-level post about the rational thing to do when you're in my position. What position you ask? You'll find out in my post. Suffice it to say for now that I don't think I'm a typical member of the LW community.
I, for one, look forward to reading your post.
If Eliezer's post has motivated you, I encourage you to write it soon before that motivation fades.
Point taken. Writing commenced.
What flavor of opposition do you anticipate? "selfish", "won't work/wasteful", or "weird"? If it is the former, you might consider the tactic of signing up your daughter first.
(I have comments further down in this thread about the odds for cryonics and changes in my views over time.)
The opposition I got when I told my parents that there is such a thing was that they didn't want to wake up as machines. I think they didn't agree that they'll be the same person.
Combine that with the uncertainty that you'll be frozen, the uncertainty that you'll wake up, the chance of Blue Gender, and of course, the cost, and it stops being such an obvious decision. Blue Gender is probably the biggest factor for me.
*Blue Gender is an anime about a kid who signed up for cryonics, and woke up while being evacuated from fugly giant insects.God forbid. But even you guys suggest that FAI has a 1% chance of success or so. Is it so great to die, be reborn, and die AGAIN?
Be careful about evidence from fiction.
Let's see...
What are the chances of you being revived without AGI? It's possible, but probably less likely for a variety of reasons (without AGI, it's harder to reach that technological level, and without AGI, it's harder for humanity to survive long enough (because of existential risks) to get to that technological level in the first place, etc).
But that's not all. If this AGI isn't Certified Friendly, the chances of humanity surviving for very long after it starts recursively improving are also pretty slim.
So chances are, if you are woken up, it'll be in a world with FAI. If things go really bad, you'd probably never find out...
Am I making up a just-so story here? Do others think this makes sense?
I hope so. Most UFAI scenarios so far suggested, IIRC, end with everyone either dead or as mindless blobs of endless joy (which may or may not be the same thing, but I'd pick wireheading over death). But remember that the UFAI's designers, stupid though they may be, will be unlikely to forget "thou shalt not kill featherless bipeds with straight nails". So there's a disturbing and non-negligible chance of waking up in Christian heaven.
Edit: So after all this, does cryonics still sound like a good idea? If yes, why? I really, really WANT there to be reasons to sign up. I want to see that world without traffic jams or copyright lawyers. But I'm just not convinced, and that's depressing.
Or in "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect".
Prime Intellect was like this close to being Friendly.
The possibility of being woken up by an UFAI might be regarded as a good reason to avoid cryonics.
From what I know, the danger of UFAI isn't that such an AI would be evil like in fiction (anthropomorphized AIs), but rather that it wouldn't care about us and would want to use resources to achieve goals other than what humans would want ("all that energy and those atoms, I need them to make more computronium, sorry").
I suppose it's possible to invent many scenarios where such an evil AI would be possible, but it seems unlikely enough based on the information that I have now that I wouldn't gamble a chance at life (versus a certain death) based on this sci-fi plot.
But if you are scared of UFAI, you can do something now by supporting FAI research. It might actually be more likely for us to face a UFAI within our current lives than after being woken up from cryonic preservation (since just the fact of being woken up is probably a positive sign of FAI).
I presume he was referring to disutopias and wireheading scenarios that he could hypothetically consider worse than death.
Forgive my ignorance, but aren't the real costs of cryonics much higher than their nominal fees, given the need to ensure that the preserved are financially secure post re-animation? What is the relative utility of perhaps having the chance of being re-animated as compared to not having a poor lifestyle (i.e. "going to the movies or eating at nice restaurants") now?
Good point. Childless retirees often convert their entire wealth into a whole-life annuity, with the expected profit to the issuer possibly going to a charity - Charitable Gift Annuity.
OP upvoted for displaying emotions that fit the facts.
Just so I understand this part of your point, what do you mean by "hero" (as in "I am a hero" but also the previous paragraph where you talk about who is and isn't a hero)? Is that a reference to some earlier article I missed, maybe?
You're not missing any context. I thought there was a pretty clear divide at the gathering between people living their ordinary lives as sound studio technicians or scientists or whatever; and people trying to change life as we know it, like me or the cancer-cure guy or the old guard who'd spent years trying to do something about the insane loss of life. I'm not sure how I could make it any clearer. Some were in class "heroes", some were in class "the ordinary lives that heroes protect".
Presumably some would reserve the word "hero" for those who actually succeed in changing life as we know it (for the better), and thus would be confused by your usage.
Indeed.
Yeah, maybe a better term to use in this context would be something like "revolutionary" (a bit aggrandizing, but so is "hero", and I'd say it's well-deserved). That would be for those who are actively trying, whether or not they have personally made any significant, lasting contributions — the heroes would be those who have.
(Not that we'd want this to turn into a status game, of course. The only point of debate here is whether clearer terminology could be used.)
"Aspiring hero" is good enough, I think.
I could accept that. That's really the only point I was trying to make; that trying to do something noble, like curing cancer, is praiseworthy, but does not automatically make someone a hero. Lots of people try to cure cancer; most of them are well-intentioned kooks or quacks... and even of those who aren't, those who work on possible cancer cures within a rigourous scientific/rational framework, most of them will fail. As I said, they are worthy of praise and recognition for their efforts, but they are not automatically heroes. But I would be fine with calling them "aspiring heroes".
I'm trying to make sure I'm not arguing about definitions here, but I'm not sure if the disagreement is over the definition of the word "hero" or over what we value enough to consider heroic. I might be persuaded that even trying to cure cancer is a heroic act, but I'm not sure how we could avoid having that include the well-intentioned kooks too.
Edit: Actually, I think I just persuaded myself: the well-intentioned kooks tend to promote their kookery without sufficient evidence, possibly giving people false hope or even leading people to choose an ineffective treatment over one relatively likely to be effective. That is not heroic regardless of intent. I can accept that if a person is working on cancer treatments with rationality, scientific rigour, and intellectual honesty, then they can reasonably be described as heroic.
I think revolutionary is still a little lofty. These people consumed a product. They were among the first people to consume a product. The whole post reads like, "I liked Nirvana before they were popular, and I want special status conveyed on me to recognize that fact."
Like I said, most of the people at that gathering were not heroes; they were people who signed up out of common sense. Some of them were trying to cure cancer (literally) or get the whole world signed up for cryonics; those were the heroes.
I meant "revolutionary" would be for "people trying to change life as we know it" (as Eliezer put it), not just anybody signed up for cryonics. (And "hero" would be for those who succeed at changing life as we know it (for the better).) But maybe it's not the best term anyway, it was just an example.
I agree with the morality of signing up your children for cryonics, but something is tickling my mind that I am unsure of.
If they die as children and cryonics works, they may wake up in a very different situation and their parents may not have survived. This still seems much better than dying, and perhaps children would be better able to adapt to any future shock, but cryonics at this point entails the risk of a discontinuous leap into an alien future. Adults at least know what they are getting themselves into and make the choice for themselves.
At the present time I am not signed up for cryonics but I intend to. I will influence my wife to sign up (and presumably our kids once we have kids.). I plan to suggest to my parents that they sign up for cryonics, but they probably won't. I'm not planning to try push them, or particularly mount an effort to change their minds. At the moment I feel like they need to come into it themselves if they are going to be happy about it later.
Compare: death.
Would you kill them to prevent it?
The morality of the issue is clear and intuitive to me: uncertainty is hugely preferable to death.
However, I also see a blind spot in my reasoning: I don't understand the implications of making that kind of decision for someone else, including someone (a child) who is incapable of making decisions for themselves yet. I'm not sure if this is significantly different than all the other decisions parents make for their children. Maybe I'll understand it better when I actually have kids - but right now I know I don't understand the implications of making big decisions for a non-consenting person.
I wonder if it's really so different from all the other decisions that parents take and that often end up saving kids lives (and thus giving them some responsibility for exposing them to an uncertain future).
Would someone face the same moral dilemma with seatbelts? I don't think so, but what's the difference?
It is possible that a far future would be a bad place for that child that you saved, but it is also possible for the near future to be a bad place (from poverty all the way to surviving a nuclear holocaust and living through The Road), yet we seem to be fine making that choice to save them.
I'm not sure the difference is quite as big as we might first think. There is more uncertainty, but it goes both way (could be much worse, but could also be much better), and maybe it cancels out.
Choosing the status quo is still making a decision.
There is no "but". If it's better, you should do it. If the "risk of a discontinuous leap into an alien future" is so serious, then you should admit that it's actually worse if the children survive, which I don't buy.
See also: Reversal test, Shut up and multiply.
I'm still trying to convince my friends.
It's still not working.
Maybe I'm doing it backwards. Who is already signed up and wants to be my friend?
EDIT:
I found all the information I need here: http://www.cryonics.org/become.html
I'll say it again: It's much easier for you to sign up alone than it is to convince your friends to sign up with you.
I will sign up when I have a reasonable expectation that I'm not buying myself a one-way ticket to Extrovert Hell.
Given the opening post I am not sure I understand what you are saying. What about being resurrected with the people described would be an Extrovert Hell? That you don't have any pre revival friends?
I'm referencing a prior thread. Pre-revival friends or family are a prerequisite for me not looking at the prospect of revival with dread instead of hope.
With those values the 'find friends who are signed up to cryonics' sounds like the obvious plan. (Well, less obvious than the one where you kidnap your friends, cut of their head and preserve it against their will. But more sane.)
I don't think most of my friendships would survive kidnapping, decapitation, and non-consensual vitrification, even if my friends survived it.
A friend will help you move. A good friend will help you move a body. A great friend is the body.
That sounded pretty odd until I looked up the parent comment, I gotta tell you.
But, but!..
Okay, 1) I dislike the "shut up and multiply" sentiment anyway, since it's so distinctly consequentialist. I will not shut up, and I will only multiply when everything I'm multiplying is really commensurate including in a deontic sense. I will walk away from Omelas should I have occasion. And 2) it's my freakin' life. I'm not deciding to deny someone else the chance to be ferried to the future on the basis of it sounding lonely.
Is there some other significance to the links and quote that you hoped I'd extract?
The significant claim seems to be that it is often necessary to quell an instinctive reaction in order to best meet your own preferences. There are some reflectively consistent preferences systems in which it is better to die than to suffer the distress of a lonely revival but there are many more that are not. I take Vladmir's suggestion to be "make sure this is what you really want, not just akrasia magnified a thousand times".
Often claims of the shape of Vladimir's are intended to enforce a norm upon the recipient. In this case the implied 'should' is of the kind "action X may best give Y what they want" which is at least slightly less objectionable.
I did a reversal test on the preference; if everybody I cared about disappeared from my life all at once and everybody who remained was as alien as the people of the future will likely be, I would probably want to die, no cryonics required.
I take it you read "Transmetropolitan?" I don't think that particular reference case is very likely.
I thought "I'm so embarrassed I could die" was just a figure of speech.
You weren't convinced by Eliezer's post? Do you think signing up for cryonics will get you ostracized from your social circles? Besides the two witnesses on some of the forms, nobody will know unless you tell them or flaunt your ID tags. Are there no two people who you are willing to trust with a secret?
...This has nothing to do with embarrassment. The problem isn't that people will stop being my friend over it, the problem is that they will all die and then the best case scenario will be that I will wake up in a bright new future completely alone.
Because the last time you woke up in a brand-new world with no friends turned out so badly?
If you're talking about how I have no prior experience with revival, all I can say is that I have to make plans for the future based on what predictions (however poor) I can make now. If you're talking about how I was born and that turned out okay, I have... y'know.. parents.
I'm actually still confused. That doesn't sound like 'Extrovert Hell'. Extroverts would just make a ton of new friends straight away. A lone introvert would have more trouble. Sure, it would be an Extrovert Very Distressing Two Weeks, but death is like that. (Adjust 'two weeks' to anything up to a decade depending on how vulnerable to depression you believe you will be after you are revived.)
I honestly do not think I'd last two weeks. If I go five conscious hours without having a substantial conversation with somebody I care about, I feel like I got hit by a brick wall. I'm pretty sure I only survived my teens because I had a pesky sister who prevented me from spending too long in psychologically self-destructive seclusion.
Wow. That isn't an exaggerating? Is that what normal extraverts are like or are you an outlier. So hard to imagine.
Nope, not exaggerating. I say "five hours" because I timed it. I don't know if I'm an outlier or not; most of my friends are introverts themselves.
Sounds like "five hours" might be something worth the pain of practicing to extend. Maybe not for you, but outlier time-brittle properties like that in me worry me.
That seems like a fairly extreme outlier to me. I'm an extrovert, and for me that appears to mean simply that I prefer activities in which I interact with people to activities where I don't interact with people.
Are you supposed to be the extrovert in the 'extrovert hell' scenario? Extroverts generally don't have trouble finding new friends, or fear a situation where they find themselves surrounded by strangers.
I'm the extrovert, yes. In the sense of needing people, not in the sense of finding them easy to be around (I have a friend who finds it fantastically amusing to call herself a social introvert and me an antisocial extrovert, which is a fair enough description). I actually get very little value from interacting with strangers, especially in large groups. I need people who I'm reasonably close to in order to accomplish anything, and that takes some time to build up to. None of my strategies for making new friends will be present in a no-pre-reviv-friends-or-family wake-up scenario.
Hmm, ok. I'd say you're using 'extrovert' in a fairly non-standard way but I think I understand what you're saying now.
I think of an extrovert as someone who recharges by being around other people, and an introvert as someone who recharges by being alone, regardless of social proclivity or ability.
"I make new friends easily" is one of the standard agree/disagree statements used to test for extraversion which is why I find this usage a little unusual.
(Although naturally there tends to be a correlation with the latter two.)
If you don't like being alone in the bright new future you can always off yourself.
Or try to make friends with other recently-revived cryonicists. That's what extroverts are good at, right?
That would be a fine way to spend money, wouldn't it, paying them to not let me die only for me to predictably undo their work?
My comment about suicide was a joke to contrast my recommendation: make friends.
I think you assign high probability to all of the following:
Please correct me if I'm wrong. If you think any of those are unlikely and you think cryonics will work, then you should sign up by yourself.
Yeah. Even though a couple of them have expressed interest, there is a huge leap from being interested to actually signing up.
This is my present plan. We'll see if it works.
I'm not willing to bet on this.
I do not want my brain messed with. If I expected to arrive in a future that would mess with my brain without my permission, I would not want to go there.
I have to say, if 3 fails, I would tend to downvote that future pretty strongly. We seem to have very different ideas of what a revival-world will and should look like, conditional on revival working at all.
If you want make friends with cryonicists, sign up. For every one person I meet who is signed up, I hear excuses from ten others: It won't work. It will work but I could be revived and tortured by an evil AI. The freezing process could cause insanity. It'll probably work but I've been too lazy to sign up. I'm so needy I'll kill myself without friends. Etc.
It gets old really fast.
What's the difference between making friends now and making friends after you wake up? What's the difference between making a family now, and making a new family then? (here I'm referencing both this comment about finding new friends, and your comment in the other thread about starting a new family)
If a friendly singularity happens, I think it's likely that the desire of extroverts like you for companionship and close relationship will have been taken into account along the way and that forming these bonds will still be possible.
Of course right now I'd want to be with my current fiancé, and I'm planning to try to convince her to sign up for cryonics, but if I lost her, I'd still rather live and have to figure out another way to get companionship in the far future than to die.
First of all, my friends aren't interchangeable. It's already a big step for me to be willing to make a presorted cryonics-friendly friend as a substitute for getting my entire existing cohort of companions on board, or even just one. Second of all, waiting until after revival introduces another chain of "ifs" - particularly dreadful ifs - into what's already a long, tenuous chain of ifs.
Of course they aren't. I'm just saying that I'd prefer making new friends to death, and that despite the fact that I love my friends very much, there's nothing that says that they are the "best friends I can ever make" and that anybody else can only provide an inferior relationship.
Once again, between the certitude of death and the possibility of life in a post-friendly-singularity world, I'll take the "ifs" even if it means doing hard things like re-building a social circle (not something easy for me).
I'm just having a really hard time imagining myself making the decision to die because I lost someone (or even everyone). In fact, I just lost my uncle (brain cancer), and I loved him dearly, he was like a second father to me. His death just made me feel even more strongly that I want to live.
But I suppose we could be at opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to these kinds of things.
I guess I'm just more dependent on ready access to deeply connected others than you? This sounds like a matter of preferences, not a matter of correctly turning those preferences into plans.
I see a disturbing surface similarity.
"If you don't teach your children the One True Religion, you're a lousy parent."
My own excuse for not signing up for cryonics is not that I don't think it will work, it's that I don't particularly value my own existence. I'm much more concerned about the effects of my death on other people than its effects on me; I've resolved not to die before my parents do, because I don't want them to suffer the grief my death would cause.
Incidentally, is it possible to sign someone else up for cryonics, if they don't object?
"If you don't teach your children the One True Religion, you're a lousy parent."
Given that the One True Religion is actually correct, wouldn't you, in fact, be a lousy parent if you did not teach it? Someone who claims to be a Christian and yet doesn't teach their kids about Christianity is, under their incorrect belief system, condemning them to an eternity of torture, which surely qualifies as being a lousy parent in my book.
IAWYC, but to nitpick, not all Christians believe in an eternity of torture for nonbelievers. Though of course the conclusion follows for any belief in a substantially better afterlife for believers.
(I feel like this is important to point out, to avoid demonizing an outgroup, but don't trust that feeling very much. What do others think?)
Could you elaborate on this?
If you are depressed, or not enjoying life, or not satisfied with who you are for some reason or other, have you considered that if we get to a future where technology is vastly more advanced than it is now, that there might be ways to fix that and at least bring you to the level of "life enjoyment" that others who want to sign up for cryonics have (if not much more than that since we are currently very limited)?
Because of that possibility, maybe it would make sense to sign up, and if you get to the "other side" and realize that you still don't value your existence and there's no way to change that, then commit suicide.
I don't know if I can be "fixed" without changing me to the point where I'm effectively somebody else. And that's not much different than someone in the future simply having a baby and raising it to be a better person than I am. Furthermore, if the future has to choose between resurrecting me and somebody raising a child from scratch, I prefer that somebody raise a child; I'd rather the future have someone better than "me" instead of someone that I would recognize as "me".
(Additionally, the argument you just made is also an argument for getting frozen right now instead of having to wait until you die a natural death before you get to be revived in a better future. "If the afterlife is so great, why not kill yourself and get there right now?")
I don't want to get into a whole other discussion here, but I think people change a lot throughout their lives - I know I sure did - and I'm not sure if this would be such a problem. Maybe it would be, but comparing the certainty of death to that potential problem, I know I'd take the risk.
The cost of another individual might be so low in the future that there might not be a choice between you and someone else.
For someone who doesn't want to live at all right now and would commit suicide anyway, then yes, I'd recommend getting cryo'ed instead.
But for someone who enjoys life, then no, I wouldn't recommend it because it might not work (though having that possibility is still better than the certainty of annihilation).
Life > Cryo uncertainty > Death
This leads directly into the morbid subject of "What is the optimal way to kill oneself, for purposes of cryo?"
I've actually been thinking about something similar;
What if I find out I have an incurable degenerative brain disease. At which point would I decide to get vitrified to improve my chances of being successfully revived by keeping my brain in better condition at the time of my death?
Now that's a tough decision to make...
If you live in the US, make sure you have had life insurance for at least two years. Then move to Oregon or Washington.
The future will have this choice (not to revive you), and will make it against you if this turns out to be a better option, but if you don't make it to the future, you won't give it the chance of doing this particular thing (your revival) in case it turns out to be a good thing.
Again, you can't be certain of what your preference actually says in the not-clear-cut cases like this, you can't know for sure that you prefer some child to be raised in place of yourself, and for this particular question it seems to be a false dilemma, since it's likely that there will be no resource limitation of this kind, only moral optimization.
Most of my desires seem to take the form "I don't want to do/experience X". Those desires of the form "I want to do/experience X" seem to be much weaker. Being dead means that I will have no experiences, and will therefore never have an experience I don't want, at the cost of never being able to have an experience I do want. Because I want to avoid bad experiences much more than I want to have good experiences, being dead doesn't seem like all that bad a deal.
I'm also incredibly lazy. I hate doing things that seem like they take work or effort. If I'm dead, I'll never have to do anything at all, ever again, and that has a kind of perverse appeal to it.
I just wanted to note that your post seems completely alien to me.
This rejection doesn't work: if the world of the future changes so that bad experiences don't happen, and good experiences are better, it's in your interest to see it. Furthermore, do you prefer your current disposition, or you'd rather it'd change?
I don't know if I want it to change or not, but that doesn't seem like something to worry about because I don't know how to change my disposition and I don't know how to go about figuring how to change my disposition.
You know what? Someone should just go hunt down CronoDAS and forcibly cryo-suspend him. It'd be doing everyone a favour. He'd get to live in a future where he doesn't have to be geek-emo, a perceived 'murder' would be less shameful than a suicide for his parents and we wouldn't have the same old hand wringing conversation all the time.
See you on the other side. (Or not, as the case may be.)
This post was obviously a joke, but "we should kill this guy so as to avoid social awkwardness" is probably a bad sentiment, revival or no revival.
On the other hand, "we should (legally) kill this guy so as to save his life" is unethical and I would never do it. But it is a significant question and the kind of reasoning that is relevant to all sorts of situations.
Should I stop talking about this here?
No, I don't mind at all. As long as you don't mind that I don't treat this specific desire of yours with sombre dignity. I do, after all, think a death wish as an alternative to cryonic revival where your mental health can be restored is silly and something to laugh at (and so lower in status and discourage without being actually aggressive.)
Well, as long as I'm being funny...
How would you make sure that will not happen?
I'll rephrase.
I've resolved not to die voluntarily before my parents do.
Obviously they have to actively consent at some point - even if only to sign the papers you shove in front of them. And then they need to cooperate while dying.
But I suppose you could do the research and fill out the form and pay for their insurance policy, yeah. But I wouldn't do that for someone who might screw it all up at the end.
It's good reasoning (from respective premises) in both cases. It is believing that the One Religion is True that is stupid. We have further negative associations with that kind of statement because we expect most 'stable' religious people to compartmentalise their beliefs such that the stupidity doesn't leak out into their actual judgements.
This might get me blasted off the face of the Internet, but by my (admittedly primitive) calculations, there is a >95% chance that I will live to see the end of the world as we know it, whether that be a positive or negative end. I do not see any reason to sign up for cryonics, as it will merely constitute a drain on my currently available resources with no tangible benefit. I am further unconvinced that cryonics is a legitimate industry. I am, of course, open to argument, but I really can't see cryonics as something that would rationally inspire this sort of reaction.
I've yet to be convinced by the arguments for cryonics either. Given my age and health there's a < 1% chance that I will die in the next 20 years. There are numerous reasons why cryonics could fail and I estimate the chances of it succeeding at < 10%. The events that would make it more likely to succeed will also tend to make my survival without cryonics more likely. Overall I don't find the cost/benefit very compelling. The weirdness of it (contra the theme of Eliezer's post) is a factor as well.
But with life insurance you only pay that <1% worth, so it balances out.
If the weirdness is a negative factor, then just don't tell anybody.
Well, life insurance by necessity does not give fair odds but I take your point.
Not telling anybody doesn't solve the weirdness factor. I'd feel weird wearing a tin foil hat to prevent the government controlling my mind even if I only did it in secret.
Life insurance companies need to make a profit, but there's a large gain from trade when you swap the life insurance proceeds for a cryonic suspension(1). The net return on the whole transaction is not necessarily negative.
(1) Though technically, the gain from trade isn't just from trading money for cryonics, since money has no intrinsic value, just opportunity costs. The gain-from-trade comes from the three steps of (a) working some hours to get money, (b) trade small amounts of money in most Everett branches for large amounts of money in Everett branches where you die, which involves paying some overhead (c) trade life insurance proceeds for many hours in those branches. The gains emerge in steps (a) and (c).
The reason I'm not currently persuaded that cryonics is worth it for me is that it is one of quite a large number of things I could do that have a very low probability of a very large benefit. With cryonics there's a high level of uncertainty around both the probability of success and the magnitude of the benefit. I don't have the time or resources to sign up for all such things, nor do I currently have the inclination to devote the resources to investigating all of them thoroughly enough to narrow the uncertainty. Cryonics is hovering around the level where additional research may seem worthwhile whereas, say, buddhism is not. It hasn't quite crossed the threshold yet however.
If you know that the weirdness feeling is due to bad reasons, then tell it to go to hell :p
In a world full of crazies the right answer is going to feel weird, so you might as well get used to the feeling.
Say you survive the next 20 years and say your probability to die in the 20 years hence be < 10%. Would you sign up for cryonics then? If not, what is that probability of death which will make you sign up for cryonics?
PS: How did you come up with the probability of < 1% about your own death?
http://www.allcountries.org/uscensus/129_death_and_death_rates_by_age.html
Probably no tangible benefit, but expected utility? Those few percent, or tenths of a percent, where cryonics saves you are worth a lot (assuming you have values that make cryonics worth considering in the first place).
(Full disclosure: I'm not signed up, but only because I think cryonics costs would come from the same "far-mode speculative futurism" mental account as better uses of money, rather than "luxury consumption". If not for that consideration — which I'm not all that sure about in any case — the decision would be massively overdetermined.)
Do you believe in having non-human-universal values, just because of believing you do or even because of having learned to follow them? Can you elaborate?
I'm curious as to how you calculate that >95%. I ask because I, personally, overestimated the threats from what amounts to unfriendly AI at two points in time (during the Japanese 5th generation computer project, and during Lenat's CYC project), and I overestimated the threat from y2k (and I thought I had a solid lower bound on its effects from unprepared sectors of the economy at the time). Might you be doing something similar?
Full disclosure: I have cryonics arrangements in place (with Alcor), but I'm unsure whether the odds of actually being revived or uploaded justify the (admittedly small) costs. Since I've signed up (around 1990 or so) I've revised my guess as to the odds downwards for a couple of reasons: (a) full Drexler/Merkle nanotech is taking much longer to be developed than I'd have guessed - "never" is still a distinct possibility (b) If we do get full nanotech, Robin Hanson's malthusian scenario of exploding upload replication looks chillingly plausible (c) During the Bush years, biodeathicists like Leon Kass actually got positions in high places. I'd anticipated that life extension might be a very hard technical problem - but not that there would be people in power actively trying to stop it.
Think Global Soreff.
Japan and China have huge aging populations. Their incentive to develop life extension treatments will be much greater than the biodeathicists ability to impede the same in the United States.
China is facing a huge aging problem. They are probably the first country to get old before getting rich. if i were in the chinese politburo, I'd be POURING money into life extension research.
Though why Japan already hasn't done so seems surprising from this viewpoint. Any ideas Why Japan hasn't poured money into healthspan extension?
My estimate of the probabilities involved in calculating the payoff from cryonics differs from your estimates. I do not think it follows that I am a bad parent.
Suppose your child dies. Afterward, everyone alive at the time of a Friendly intelligence explosion plus the tiny handful signed up for cryonics, live happily ever after. 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?
After all, your child could die in a car crash on a shopping trip, and yet taking them along on that shopping trip could still have been the best possible choice given the statistical information that you had. Is that the plea you would make in the above event? What probabilities do you assign?
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".
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.
Antiakrasia, future-self-influencing recommendation: if you can afford $10/year today, make sure your current level of giving is not zero.
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.
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 reject your framing. I would say that I had made a bad mistake. Errors do not a bad parent make. Or, to put it another way, suppose you woke up in the Christian Hell; would you plead that you had made the best decision on the available information? Scary what-ifs are no argument. You cannot make me reconsider a probability assignment by pointing out the bad consequences if my assessment is wrong; you can only do so by adding information. I understand that you believe you're trying to save my life, but please be aware that turning to the Dark Side to do so is not likely to impress me; if you need the power of the Dark Side, how good can your argument be, anyway?
The brain's functioning depends on electric and chemical potentials internal to the cells as well as connections between the cells. I believe that cryonics can maintain the network, but not the internal state of the nodes; consequently I assign "too low to meaningfully consider" to the probability of restoring my personality from my frozen brain. If the technology improves, I will reconsider.
Edit: I should specify that right now I have no children, lest I be misunderstood. It seems quite possible I will have some in the near future, though.
Predictable errors do.
Hell yes.
One way of assessing probabilities is to ask how indignant we have a right to be if reality contradicts us. I would be really indignant if contradicted by reality about Christianity being correct. How indignant would you be if Reality comes back and says, "Sorry, cryonics worked"? My understanding is that dogs have been cooled to the point of cessation of brain activity and revived with no detected loss of memory, though I'd have to look up the reference... if that will actually convince you to sign up for cryonics; otherwise, please state your true rejection.
I don't think this is really the issue. If I make a bet in poker believing (correctly given the available information) that the odds are in my favour but I go on to lose the hand I am not indignant - I was perfectly aware I was taking a calculated risk. In retrospect I should have folded but I still made the right decision at the time. Making the best decision given the available information doesn't mean making the retrospectively correct decision.
I haven't yet reached the point where cryonics crosses my risk/reward threshold. It is on my list of 'things to keep an eye on and potentially change my position in light of new information' however.
If you make a bet in poker believing that you have .6 chance of winning, and you lose, I believe your claim that you will not be indignant. In this case you have a weak belief that you will win. But, if you lose bets with the same probability 10 times in row, would you feed indignant? Would you question your assumptions and calculations that led to the .6 probability?
If it turns out the cryonics works, would you be surprised? Would you have to question any beliefs that influence your current view of it?
Yes, at some point if I kept seeing unexpected outcomes in poker I would begin to wonder if the game was fixed somehow. I'm open to changing my view of whether cryonics is worthwhile in light of new evidence as well.
I wouldn't be hugely surprised if at some point in the next 50 years someone is revived after dying and being frozen. My doubts are less related to the theoretical possibilities of reviving someone and more to the practical realities and cost/benefit vs. other uses of my available resources.
http://74.125.155.132/scholar?q=cache:ZNOvlaxp0p8J:scholar.google.com/&hl=en&as_sdt=2000
There is experimental evidence to allay that specific concern. People have had flat EEGs (from barbituate poisoning, and from (non-cryogenic!) hypothermia). They've been revived with memories and personalities intact. The network, not transient electrical state, holds long term information. (Oops, partial duplication of Eliezer's post below - I'm reasonably sure this has happened to humans as well, though...) (found the canine article: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1476969/)
So, how indignant are you feeling right now? Serious question.
Will you suspect the forces that previously led you to come up with this objection, since they've been proven wrong?
Will you hesitate to make a similar snap decision without looking up sources or FAQs the next time your child's life is at stake?
Not sure what exactly you mean by the "internal state of the nodes." If you are referring to inside the individual brain cells, then I think you're mistaken. We can already peer into the inside of neurons. Transmission electron microscopy is a powerful technology! Combine it with serial sectioning with a diamond knife and you can get quite a lot of detail in quite a large amount of tissue.
For example consider Ragsdale et al's recent study, to pick the first sstem scopus result. They looked at some sensory neurons in C. elegans, and were able to identify not just internal receptors but also which cells (sheath cells) contain abundant endoplasmic reticulum, secretory granules, and/or lipid globules.
This whole discussion comes down to what level of scale separation you might need to recapitulate the function of the brain and the specific characteristics that make you you. Going down to say the atomic level would probably be very difficult, for instance. But there's good reason to think that we won't have to go nearly that far down to reproduce human characteristics. Have you read the pdf roadmap? No reason to form beliefs w/o the relevant knowledge! :)
I just came up with another excuse: I can't afford to pay for it.
I don't have $29,250 in savings. I also have no income and don't expect to have one in the future. Given the nature of the insurance business, the expected value of buying life insurance should be negative; I can't buy the insurance with my savings and expect to get a larger payout unless I take steps to hasten my own death.
You should know by now that "I just came up with another excuse" is a red flag for motivated cognition. We might not have even found your true reason for rejection yet...
Well, my true reason might indeed be something more along the lines of "my parents wouldn't approve of it".
And the original post referred to reasons not to sign up for cryonics as "excuses" so I copied the terminology. ;)
Yet another possible "true rejection":
I don't feel as though I deserve to be revived in the future. I suspect that my existence has been a net loss for the world so far. I make garbage. I've been educated at taxpayer expense. I've done very little that anyone would consider a service worth paying for. I'm a leech, a parasite, a (figurative) basement dweller, a near-hikikomori, a lazy bum, a loser, and plenty of other negative terms. And this isn't going to change. So why should I leave the future with the burden of dealing with me?
That sounds like it could be closer to home.
Tell you what. If I make it (to the creation of an FAI), and no one else has already done it, I will personally spend the resources to revive you and pay for your upkeep. I further make this pledge for anyone who is cryopreserved and unwanted.
I'm pretty sure most people are concerned more with the scenario where revival comes before FAI.
I think most people who are concerned about revival aren't really considering on an emotional level FAI at all. I'd considered making the same promise regardless of FAI, but I think that it would be negligent of me to do so, with such important investment opportunities available. Also, I'm not sure I'd have that much money, even for just CronoDAS.
This is thoroughly confused. The expected amount of money out of the deal is negative, but even expected value of money is positive (otherwise people shouldn't buy insurance), and in this particular case you need to think about expected value of your post-revival life, not money.
That's what I meant to say.
If were to try to buy cryonics with a life insurance policy, I'll probably run out of savings with which to pay the insurance premiums before I die of natural causes.
Ah, OK. Assuming the insane premises that you keep stating, this conclusion makes sense.
Life insurance is purchased more for signaling than as a financial instrument. (Life insurance was unsellable when the product was invented; the concept of your family profiting from your death was morbid. Salesmen eventually realized they had to market it as something a man purchases to provide for his family in the unlikely event of his death; buying it was buying the identity of a successful family man.)
I originally wrote "otherwise people won't buy insurance", then recognized the difference, and posted the phrasing "otherwise people shouldn't buy insurance". A lot of insurance really does have positive expected value.
Was this the get-together in Florida from the 8th to the 10th? I decided not to go since I assumed everyone would be from the atheist/libertarian/male/nerd/singularity/etc group. I'm glad to see I was wrong.
Yup, that one.
I'm seeing a disturbing amount of groupthink here. We're all assuming that cryonics is a good thing, and that the only thing in dispute is whether the amount of good that cryonics generates is worth the cost. However, given that no one who has been cryogenically frozen has yet been revived, how do we know that cryonics is a good thing at all? I mean, what if the freezing process somehow changed neurochemistry so that everyone who came back was a psychopath? Given that we don't have any evidence either way, why are we all jumping to the conclusion that cryonics is something that we'd all sign up for if only we had the means?
Or not.
Well, aren't you privileging the hypothesis that cryonics works? I mean, I look at Eliezer's argument above, and the unstated assumption is, "Cryonics works and has no ill side effects." Well, lets question that assumption. What if cryonics doesn't work? What if it works, but leaves you disabled? I know several people who have "living wills" - they'd rather be dead than disabled. Unless you're saying that your hypothetical thawing process will be nearly perfectly safe, I'd argue that there is a risk of disability, an outcome which may rank below death (depending on your individual value function, of course).
Given the above, would you say, "Anyone who doesn't buy cryonics for their children is a bad parent?" After all, aren't you imposing your value function vis a vis potential disability onto your children? Shouldn't we let them decide their own values regarding such a significant issue?
Making people into psychopaths would be extremely difficult even if you were trying to do it. Cryonics working is a hypothesis that I would put as 'very slightly more likely than a desirable technological singularity'. It is worth the $300 a year because it is one of very few things that can actually save your life in the long term.
I count all those scenarios as 'cryonics not working'.
That's not his assumption. The assumption is that there is a non-negligible chance that cryonics will work -- one chance in ten would be more than sufficient. Another assumption is that the opportunity to spend more time alive is far more desirable than death. It then follows that it's nuts not to sign up.
Yeah, as wedrifid pointed out in a sibling post, I think Eliezer and I have different conceptions of what it means for cryonics to "work". I was defining "works" as a having a thawing process that doesn't kill you, but has the risk of disability. Eliezer, I now realize, has a much more stringent definition of the term.
Now, one more question, if you will humor me. What sort of incentives can we use to ensure that we are not used as guinea pigs for an experimental thawing process? For example, our descendants may want us thawed as soon as possible, even when the thawing process may not have been made sufficiently safe by our own criteria. How can we set up the incentives so that our descendants don't thaw us using a procedure that we consider unnecessarily risky?
Dammit quanticle, I'm an engineer/biochemist/statistician, not an economist!
I suppose extend whichever incentives that we use to make our descendants even bother with us at all. (Outside my field too I am afraid. I'm more of a 'take direct action myself' kind of guy than a 'find some way to make people do stuff even when I am dead' kind of guy.)
Alcor's patient care trust board is composed of people who are signed up for cryonics. A majority of members on the board must have a cryopreserved relative or significant other. They could try to use people they don't care about as guinea pigs, but there are also bylaws about ethically reviving people.
Only a much wealthier, more technologically advanced society would unfreeze corpses. Less technologically advanced societies couldn't do it, and poorer societies wouldn't bother.
Over time, wealth eventually causes the cultural changes we call "moral progress".
Almost all bad scenarios lead to cryopreserved people never being revived. They either become "gray goo", are eaten by roving bands of cannibals, are converted into paperclips, etc.
So anyway, I think in most scenarios reanimation will be better than death.
This is one of the old standard objections; I won't spoonfeed you, but try looking through the pro-cryonics literature. (I have yet to think of a decent argument against cryonics which hasn't been at least discussed.)
Cryonics is a regular topic here and on OB. The conclusion that's being "jumped to" has been argued at length elsewhere. It appears you're mistaking inferential distance for groupthink.
It doesn't look like a particularly strong consensus to me - the survey a while back had a sizeable minority of cryonics skeptics, and all of three people actually signed-up. And, of course, all the argument in the comments to this post.
Never say "groupthink" unless you have better evidence than people agreeing.
I agree with ciphergoth (or perhaps I'm groupthinking with him/her :P). As for the part of your post that came after the first sentence: when we develop the technology to revive cryopreserved people, we will see if it has any recurring, statistically-significant undesirable effects on people's psychology. If it does, we'll stop reviving people until we get it sorted out.
The very small risk of accidentally turning a few people into psychopaths before we notice the pattern (I say the risk is small because we don't have any particular reasons to privilege that or any other non-null hypothesis) is, I think, worth the large potential benefits to the individuals and to society.
For the record, does anyone have a good website I can link my father to containing a reasonably persuasive case for signing up for cryonics? He's a smart guy and skilled at Traditional Rationality; I think he can be persuaded to sign up, but I don't know if I can persuade him. (When I told him the actual price of cryonics, his response was something like "Sure, you can preserve someone for that amount, but revival, once it exists, would probably cost the equivalent of millions of dollars, and who would pay for that?")
Revival when first developed will probably cost the equivalent of hundreds of millions. You won't be revived until the cost is much lower; if progress continues and UFAI is avoided, I can't see how that can fail to happen.
I was raised to consider organ donation to be the moral thing to do on my death.
I am less skeptical than average of cryonics, and nervous about "neuro" options since I'd prefer to be revived earlier and with a body. On the other hand, it still seems to me that organ donation is the more effective option for more-people-being-alive-and-happy, even if it's not me.
Am I stuck with the "neuro" option for myself? How should that translate to my children?
What do most people on LW think about organ donation?
ETA: the Cryonics Institute (the only page I've seen linked here) doesn't have that option, so am I stuck paying much more? Informative links would be appreciated.
To make up for not being an organ donor cut back on some area of personal consumption and donate the money to a charity. Since the probability of someone actually getting your organs if you agreed to be an organ donor are, I think, very low you wouldn't have to give that much to a charity for you do be doing more social good through the charitable contribution than you would have as a potential organ donor.
So does the lack of discussion of organ donation stem from its perceived lack of efficacy? If so why discuss cryonics so heavily, when it costs money? I remember Robin Hanson assigning it around a 5% chance of success (for his personal setup, not cryonics eventually working at all which I assume would be much higher), and I would naively assume that I have a greater than 5% chance of my organs helping someone (any statistics on this?).
I agree that donating to charity is likely to be more effective, but it is also likely to be more effective than cryonics (as discussed elsewhere) and donating organs doesn't actually take away from my charity funds.
I don't mean to speak to making agreements for children, I think that stands as the right thing to do.
Well, I do know that cryopreservation and organ donation are currently mutually exclusive, even if you go with a "neuro" option.
I don't know whether it's better to sign up for cryonics or to be an organ donor.
I have a cryonics related question, and this seems as good a thread as any to ask it.
I'm a New Zealander and most discussions of cryonics that I've been exposed to focus on the United States, or failing that Europe. If I have to have my head packed in ice and shipped to the US for preservation its going to degrade a fair bit before it gets there (best case scenario its a 12 hour flight, and that's just to LA, in practice time from death to preservation could be days). This is not a pleasant prospect for me, since it could lower the probability of successful revival by a large margin.
Since there are about 24 million people in Australia and New Zealand I'm sure I'm not the first person to realise this. Is anyone out there aware of any reputable cryonics organisations that are a bit closer to home? Alternatively, can anyone point me to sources that contradict my belief that the distance my head would have to travel would make cryonics a poor bet?
There has been talk of a cryosuspension facility in Australia. But flying the body to North America is the only way it's been done so far.
I'm inclined to believe this number is a lie, as I refuse to believe you are stupid enough to make mistakes of this order of magnitude.
The claimed $180/year (claimed $300 figure minus membership costs) * 50 or so more years people will live only gives $9k. Safe investment gives you barely enough to keep up with inflation, so you cannot use exponential growth argument.
Real costs are around $100k-$200k reference.
Real life insurance costs increase drastically as you age, and as your chance of death increases. Surely you must know that. If you paid the same amount of money each year, you'd need to pay $2k-$5k depending on your cryonics provider and insurance company overhead.
What will very likely happen is people paying for life insurance, then finding out at age of 70 that their life insurance costs increase so much that they cannot afford it any more, and so they won't see any cryonics even though they paid big money all their lives for it. (Not that chances of cryonics working are significant enough for it to make much difference).
"Lie" is much too strong a term, but I get the same result when I multiply 180 by 50, and I'm curious to understand the discrepancy.
taw, real life insurance costs increase drastically as you age, but only if you are beginning the policy. They don't readjust the rates on a life insurance policy every year; that's just buying a series of one-year term-life policies.
I.e., if I buy whole-life insurance coverage at 25, my rate gets locked in. My monthly/annual premium does not increase as I age due to the risk of dying increasing.
How does the insurer hope to make a profit, given that they're probably betting on death being inevitable?
"Funded by life insurance" strikes me as an oversimplified summary of a strategy that must necessarily be more sophisticated. Plus "life insurance" actually means several different things, only some of which actually insure you against loss of life.
I'm still trying to find out more, but it seems the most effective plan would be a "term" life insurance (costs about $30 a month for 20 years at my age, 40ish and healthy), which lasts a limited duration, isn't an investment, but does pay out a large sum to designated beneficiaries in the event of death. (I haven't done the math on inflation yet.) You would combine that with actual long-term investments earmarked for funding the actual costs of the procedure if you need it after 20 years. These investments may be "life insurance" of the usual kind, or stocks, or whatever.
Doing that mitigates the scenario I'm really worried about: learning in 2 to 10 years that in spite of being (relatively) young, healthy and wealthy I have a fatal disease (cancer, Lou Gehrig, whatever) and having to choose between my family's stability and dying for ever. Cryonics as insurance against feeling dreadfully stupid.
In twenty years I expect I will have obtained more information, and gotten richer, and might make different choices.
I'm interested enough in cryo that I'm actually trying to get actual quotes, as opposed to merely speculating; I have gotten in touch with Rudi Hoffman who was recommended earlier on LW. My situation - non-US resident - might mean that whatever results I get are not really representative, but I'm willing to report back here with whatever info I get.