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RichardKennaway comments on Costs to (potentially) eternal life - Less Wrong
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I would be interested to hear from those who are actually signed up for cryonics. In what ways, if any, have you changed your willingness to undertake risks?
For example, when flying, do you research the safety records of the airlines that you might travel with, and always choose the best? Do you ride a motorbike? Would you go skydiving or mountaineering? Do you cross the road more carefully since discovering that you might live a very long time? Do you research diet, exercise, and other health matters? Do you always have at the back of your mind the thought: if I had a heart attack right now, what plans are in place for a controlled deanimation? And so on.
The same question applies to those who, whether or not they take cryonics seriously, do take seriously the possibility of radical life-extension coming soon enough to radically extend their own lives. How strenuously are you trying to stay alive and healthy long enough for your fragile vessel to reach the promised land?
ETA: bgrah449 writes in a comment below:
Someone who takes cryonics seriously and is signed up, already believes their life expectancy has gone up drastically. Or at least, drastically*probability of revival.
I haven't significantly changed my willingness to take risks, but then again I have always been very risk averse.
I would never ride a motorbike or go mountaineering etc. I eat well, don't smoke, try to avoid stress and exercise regularly.
I did all these things even before I took cryonics seriously . This is because it was obvious that being alive is better than being dead, and these things seemed like obvious ways in which to preserve my life as long as possible.
If I found out tomorrow that cryonics was proven to NOT work, I'd still continue crossing the road very carefully.
That matches my intuition, which I'd express as: it's a particular disposition toward life risks that makes someone interested in cryonics, rather than signing up for cryonics which makes someone more prudent. (Just a hunch, I'm not saying I've thought this through.)
There are some activities I like which seem riskier than they are, such as treetop courses; the equipment makes them perfectly safe but I enjoy the adrenalin rush. When I travel by plane I enjoy takeoff and landing for similar reasons, and flying in general whenever there is a clear view of land. (Not everything abouf flying is enjoyable.)
I'm another one who is signed up, has always been risk-averse, and hasn't changed risk-averse behavior as a result of cryonics membership.
One general comment: To my mind, infinite life has something like a net present value with a finite interest rate. I probably don't apply a consistent discount rate (yes, I've read the hyperbolic discounting article). For a order-of-magnitude guess, assume that I discount at 1% annually and treat a billion year life expectancy as being roughly as valuable as 100 years of life - and a 1% chance of that as being roughly equal to gaining an extra year. I'm now 51, so adding 1 year to say 25 years is a 4% gain. Not trivial, but not a drastic increase either.
I'm not following this. Is the billion year life expectancy roughly as valuable as 100 years certain?
I'm saying that, roughly speaking, I value next year at 99% of this year, the year after that at (99%)^2 of this year, the year after that at (99%)^3 and so on. The integral of this function out to infinity gives 100 times the value of one immediate year. I'm not quite sure what you mean by "certain". Could you elaborate? I'm not trying to calculate the probability that I will actually get to year N, just to very grossly describe a utility function for how much I'd value year N from a subjective view from the present moment.
But you can't value year N at a time-discounted rate, because the unit you are discounting is time itself. Why discount 1,000,000,000 years if you won't discount 100 years? I don't understand why one can be discounted, yet the other cannot.
It's not time you're discounting; it's the experience of living that quantity of time.
I don't see the difference. Money can be spent at once, or over a period of time, so the time value of money makes sense. But you can't live 100 years over any period other than 100 years. I don't understand the time value of the experience of living.
Me-in-100 years is not me-now. I can barely self identity with me-10-years-ago. Why should I value a year someone else will live as much as I value this year that I'm living?
I have a pretty different set of values than I had fifteen years ago, but I still consider all those experiences to have happened to me. That is, they didn't happen to a different identity just because I was 18 instead of 33.
It is possible that if the me of 18 and the me of 33 talked through IRC we wouldn't recognize each other, or have much at all to talk about (assuming we avoid the subject of personal biography that would give it away directly).
The me of 67 years from now, at 100 years of age, I can also expect to be very different from the me of now, even more different from the me of now than the me of 18. We might have the same difficulty recognizing ourselves in IRC.
Yet I'm confident I'll always say I'm basically the same person I was yesterday, and that all prior experiences happened to me, not some other person; regardless of how much I may have changed. I have no reason not to think I'd go on saying that for 100,000 years.
I remember all (well, most) of my prior experiences, but memory is a small aspect of personal identity, in my opinion. Compared to my old self 10 years ago, I react different, feel differently, speak differently, have different insights, different philosophical ideas, different outlooks. It comes down to a definition though, which is arbitrary. What's important is: do you identify with your future self enough to have a 1-1 trade off between utility for yourself (you-now) and utility for them (you-in-the-future)?
So can you state the discount rate equivalencies in terms of Me-in-an-amount-of-years?
Jordan states it correctly. bgrah449, to put it in terms of decisions: I sometimes have to make decisions which trade off the experience at one point in time vs the experience at another. As you noted in your most recent post, money can be discounted in this way, and money is useful because it can be traded for things that improve the experience of any given block of time. By discounting money exponentially, I'm really discounting the value of experience - say eating a pizza - at say 5 years from now vs. now. Now I also need to be alive (I'm taking that to include an uploaded state) to have any experiences. I make choices (including having set up my Alcor membership) that affect the probability of being alive at future times, and I trade these off against goods that enhance my experience of life right now. When I say that I value a year of time N years from now at around .99^N of the value I place on my current year, it means that I would trade the same goods for the same probability change with that difference of weights for those two years. If I, say, skip a pizza to improve my odds of surviving this year (and experiencing all of the events of the year) by 0.001%, I would only be willing to skip half a pizza to improve my odds of surviving from year 72 to year 73 (and having the more distant experiences of that year) by 0.001%. Is that clearer?
Yes - thanks!
I don't think I have. Compared to most people I'm probably a bit of a risk-taker.
I don't research airline safety records. I ride a motorcycle. I haven't gone skydiving or mountaineering but both of those sound fun. I don't cross the road more carefully. I exercise (I've always enjoyed running), but don't diet (I've always enjoyed ice cream).
Unless I'm discussing cryonics with someone else I mostly don't think about it.
Most of this is just scope insensitivity and the availability bias: for instance, air travel is ridiculously safe, but airplane accidents are well publicized. Researching airline safety records is a little silly given how safe air travel is. I ride a motorcycle too, and it's much safer than it appears to some people, as long as you are properly trained, wear a helmet, and don't drink and drive. Same goes for skydiving or mountaineering.
I agree with you except for when it comes to motorcycles. Motorcycles are 4-5 times more deadly than cars in terms of death rate per vehicle and 30 times more deadly in terms of deaths per miles traveled. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorcycle_safety#Accident_rates ) Some of that is due to unsafe behavior by riders, but the fact is that a metal cage protects you better than a metal horse. Also, losing tire grip in a car means you slide. Losing grip on a bike means you fall.