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Roko comments on Abnormal Cryonics - Less Wrong
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Most people already have a reason to care about the future - since it contains their relatives and descendants - and those are among the things that they say they care about.
If you are totally sterile - and have no living relatives - cryonics might seem like a reasonable way of perpetuating your essence - but for most others, there are more conventional options.
This is plain wrong. Most of these rates is inflation premium (premium for inflation you need to pay is higher than actual inflation because you also bear entire risk if inflation gets higher than predicted, and it cannot really get lower than predicted - it's not normally distributed).
Inflation-adjusted US treasury bonds have rates like 1.68% a year over last 12 years., and never really got much higher than 3%.
For most interest rates like the UK ones you quote there's non-negligible currency exchange risk and default risk in addition to all that.
taw:
Not to mention that even these figures are suspect. There is no single obvious or objectively correct way to calculate the numbers for inflation-adjustment, and the methods actually used are by no means clear, transparent, and free from political pressures. Ultimately, over a longer period of time, these numbers have little to no coherent meaning in any case.
It seems low but it's correct. Risk-free interests rate are very very low.
Individual stocks carry very high risk, so this is nowhere near correct calculation.
And even if you want to invest in S&P index - notice the date - 2007. This is a typical survivorship bias article from that time. In many countries stock markets crashed hard, and failed to rise for decades. Not just tiny countries, huge economies like Japan too. And by 2010 the same is true about United States too (and it would be ever worse if it wasn't for de facto massive taxpayers subsidies)
Here's Wikipedia:
This wasn't true back in 2007.
This is all survivorship bias and nothing more, many other stock exchanges crashed completely or had much lower returns like Japanese.
And I should add that markets are wickedly anti-inductive. With all the people being prodded into the stock market by tax policies and "finance gurus" ... yeah, the risk is being underpriced.
Also, there needs to be a big shift, probably involving a crisis, before risk-free rates actually make up for taxation, inflation, and sovereign risk. After that happens, I'll be confident the return on capital will be reasonable again.
Levels of concern about the future vary between individuals - whereas interest rates are a property of society. Surely these things are not connected!
High interest rates do not reflect a lack of concern about the future. They just illustrate how much money your government is printing. Provided you don't invest in that currency, that matters rather little.
I agree that cryonics would make people care about the future more. Though IMO most of the problems with lack of planning are more to do with the shortcomings of modern political systems than they are to do with voters not caring about the future.
The problem with cryonics is the cost. You might care more, but you can influence less - because you no longer have the cryonics money. If you can't think of any more worthwhile things to spend your money on, go for it.
Real interest rates should be fairly constant (nominal interest rates will of course change with inflation), and reflect the price the marginal saver needs to postpone consumption, and the highest price the marginal borrower will pay to bring his forward. If everyone had very low discount rates, you wouldn't need to offer savers so much, and borrowers would consider the costs more prohibitive, so rates would fall.
They're nothing of the kind. See this. Inflation-adjusted as-risk-free-as-it-gets rates vary between 0.2%/year to 3.4%/year.
This isn't about discount rates, it's about supply and demand of investment money, and financial sector essentially erases any connection with people's discount rates.
Point taken; I concede the point. Evidently saving/borrowing rates are sticky, or low enough to be not relevant.
Perhaps decide to use gold, then. Your society's interest rate then becomes irrelevant to you - and you are free to care about the future as much - or as little - as you like.
Interest rates just do not reflect people's level of concern about the future. Your money might be worth a lot less in 50 years - but the same is not necessarily true of your investments. So - despite all the discussion of interest rates - the topic is an irrelevant digression, apparently introduced through fallacious reasoning.
Good point: mainstream cryonics would be a big step towards raising the sanity waterline, which may end up being a prerequisite to reducing various kinds of existential risk. However, I think that the causal relationship goes the other way, and that raising the sanity waterline comes first, and cryonics second: if you can get the average person across the inferential distance to seeing cryonics as reasonable, you can most likely get them across the inferential distance to seeing existential risk as really flippin' important. (I should take the advice of my own post here and note that I am sure there are really strong arguments against the idea that working to reduce existential risk is important, or at least against having much certainty that reducing existential risk will have been the correct thing to do upon reflection, at the very least on a personal level.) Nonetheless, I agree further analysis is necessary, though difficult.
Your original point was that "getting cryo to go mainstream would be a strong win as far as existential risk reduction is concerned (because then the public at large would have a reason to care about the future) and as far as rationality is concerned", in which case your above comment is interesting, but tangential to what we were discussing previously. I agree that getting people to sign up for cryonics will almost assuredly get more people to sign up for cryonics (barring legal issues becoming more salient and thus potentially more restrictive as cryonics becomes more popular, or bad stories publicized whether true or false), but "because then the public at large would have a reason to care about the future" does not seem to be a strong reason to expect existential risk reduction as a result (one counterargument being the one raised by timtyler in this thread). You have to connect cryonics with existential risk reduction, and the key isn't futurism, but strong epistemic rationality. Sure, you could also get interest sparked via memetics, but I don't think the most cost-effective way to do so would be investment in cryonics as opposed to, say, billboards proclaiming 'Existential risks are even more bad than marijuana: talk to your kids.' Again, my intuitions are totally uncertain about this point, but it seems to me that the option a) 10 million dollars -> cryonics investment -> increased awareness in futurism -> increased awareness in existential risk reduction, is most likely inferior to option b) 10 million dollars -> any other memetic strategy -> increased awareness in existential risk reduction.
I think the correct question here is instead "Do you really value a very, very small chance at you having been signed up for cryonics leading to huge changes in your expected utility in some distant future across unfathomable multiverses more than an assured small amount of utility 30 minutes from now?" I do not think the answer is obvious, but I lean towards avoiding long-term commitments until I better understand the issues. Yes, a very very very tiny amount of me is dying everyday due to freak kitchen accidents, but that much of my measure is so seemingly negligible that I don't feel too horrible trading it off for more thinking time and half a Hershey's bar.
The reasons you gave for spending a dollar a day on cryonics seem perfectly reasonable and I have spent a considerable amount of time thinking about them. Nonetheless, I have yet to be convinced that I would want to sign up for cryonics as anything more than a credible signal of extreme rationality. From a purely intuitive standpoint this seems justified. I'm 18 years old and the singularity seems near. I have measure to burn.
Perhaps. I think a singularity is more likely to occur before I die (in most universes, anyway). With advancing life extension technology, good genes, and a disposition to be reasonably careful with my life, I plan on living pretty much indefinitely. I doubt cryonics has any effect at all on these universes for me personally. Beyond that, I do not have a strong sense of identity, and my preferences are not mostly about personal gain, and so universes where I do die do not seem horribly tragic, especially if I can write down a list of my values for future generations (or a future FAI) to consider and do with that they wish.
So basically... (far) less than a 1% chance of saving 'me', but even then, I don't have strong preferences for being saved. I think that the technologies are totally feasible and am less pessimistic than others that Alcor and CI will survive for the next few decades and do well. However, I think larger considerations like life extension technology, uFAI or FAI, MNT, bioweaponry, et cetera, simply render the cryopreservation / no cryopreservation question both difficult and insignificant for me personally. (Again, I'm 18, these arguments do not hold equally well for people who are older than me.)
When I read this, two images popped unbidden into my mind: 1) you wanting to walk over the not-that-stable log over the stream with the jagged rocks in it and 2) you wanting to climb out on the ledge at Benton House to get the ball. I suppose one person's "reasonably careful" is another person's "needlessly risky."
This comment inspired me to draft a post about how much quantum measure is lost doing various things, so that people can more easily see whether or not a certain activity (like driving to the store for food once a week instead of having it delivered) is 'worth it'.
Ha, good times. :) But being careful with one's life and being careful with one's limb are too very different things. I may be stupid, but I'm not stupid.
Hm, thanks for making me really think about it, and not letting me slide by without doing calculation. It seems to me, given my preferences, about which I am not logically omniscient, and given my structural uncertainty around these issues, of which there is much, I think that my 50 percent confidence interval is between .00001%, 1 in 10 million, to .01%, 1 in ten thousand.
I like this turn of phrase.