James_Miller comments on A survey of anti-cryonics writing - Less Wrong

75 Post author: ciphergoth 07 February 2010 11:26PM

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Comment author: Rain 08 February 2010 07:23:17PM *  12 points [-]

I have three buckets of spending:

  • Life support - food and shelter. It's expensive to keep on living, and earning more money. Consider this overhead.
  • Frivolous pursuits - WoW, booze, the occasional passion in music or literature. This takes less money than you might think. Wastage.
  • Donations - I'm planning for this to be 22.5 percent of my gross income this year. By contrast, this will be 20 times my actual health insurance costs, barring unexpected personal injury, and will likely be more than life support and frivolous pursuits combined.

To note another contrast, the cost of a single full body preservation at Alcor, plus membership dues, appears to be close to the SIAI yearly budget.

Comment author: James_Miller 09 February 2010 02:28:34AM 4 points [-]

The real cost of your "Frivolous pursuits" is time. Spend less time drunk or on WoW, use the saved time to work at Burger King and use the money from Burger king to pay for cryonics.

Comment author: Rain 09 February 2010 04:11:11AM *  2 points [-]

At that point, the equation would be, "work at Burger King and use the money <to donate to cause X>". The same for getting life insurance. And that option is currently not feasible due to the fact that I already have a hard time going to work at the job I have. There's a reason I called it wastage.

I know it sounds like a status grab and signalling and all that jazz, so let me explain: I consider my martyrdom to be a symptom of depression that just so happens to benefit certain organizations. I doubt they'd complain, despite its effects on my life. I used to tell people I didn't know what to do with my money (interesting aside: the dozen or so times I said this, the answer was always the same, nearly verbatim: "give it to me"), then for a while I told people I was going to live forever (cryonics, transhumanism, etc), now I tell people I'm going to save the world.

Ideally, I'd like to do both, but right now the cost of cryonics is outrageous when compared with the (lack of) funding put toward such important issues as existential risk. I honestly believe the values don't even fit on the same scale.