So be it first noted that everyone who complains about trying to trade off cryonics against charity, instead of movie tickets or heart transplants for old people, is absolutely correct about cryonics being unfairly discriminated against.

That said, reading through these comments, I'm a bit disturbed that no one followed the principle of using the Least Convenient Possible World / strongest argument you can reconstruct from the corpse. Why are you accepting the original poster's premise of competing with African aid? Why not just substitute donations to the Singularity Institute?

So I know that, obviously, and yet I go around advocating people sign up for cryonics. Why? Because I'm selfish? No. Because I'm under the impression that a dollar spent on cryonics is marginally as useful as a dollar spent on the Singularity Institute? No.

Because I don't think that money spent on cryonics actually comes out of the pocket of the Singularity Institute? Yes. Obviously. I mean, a bit of deduction would tell you that I had to believe that.

Money spent on life insurance and annual membership in a cryonics organization rapidly fades into the background of recurring expenses, just like car insurance. To the extent it substituted for anything, it would tend to substitute for buying a house smaller by $300/year on the mortgage, or retirement savings, or something else that doesn't accomplish nearly as much good as cryonics.

There are maybe two or three people in the entire world who spend only the bare possible minimum on themselves, and contribute everything else to a rationally effective charity. They have an excuse for not signing up. No one else does.

And if you do sign up for cryonics, that contributes to a general frame of mind of "Wait, there are clever solutions to all the world's problems, this planet I'm living in doesn't make any sense, it's okay to do something that other people aren't doing, I'm part of the community of people who are part of the future, and that's why I'm going to donate to SIAI." It's a gateway drug; it's part of the ongoing lifestyle of someone with one foot in the future, staring back at a mad world and doing what they can to save it.

The basic fact about rational charity is that charity is not a matter of people starting out with fixed resources for charity and allocating them optimally. It is about the variance in the tiny little percentage of their income people give to rationally effective charity in the first place. And if I had to place my bets on empirical outcomes, I would bet that this blog post helped decrease that percentage in its readers, more than it actually resulted in any dollars going to an effective charity (i.e., SIAI, who is anyone kidding with this talk about development aid?) by helping to foster a sense of guilt and "ugh" around rational charity.

And finally, with all that said, if we actually did forget about the Singularity and the expected future value of the galaxy and take the original post at face value, if you consider the interval between a planet with slightly more developed poor countries and a planet signed up for cryonics, and ask about marginal impacts you can have on both relative to existing resources, then clearly you should be signing up for cryonics. I am tempted to add a sharp "Duh" to the end of this statement.

But of course, the actual impact of cryonics, just like the actual impact of development aid, in any rational utilitarian calculation, is simply its impact on the future of the galaxies, i.e., its impact on existential risk. Do I think that impact is net negative? Obviously not.