ciphergoth comments on On the unpopularity of cryonics: life sucks, but at least then you die - Less Wrong

72 Post author: gwern 29 July 2011 09:06PM

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Comment author: ciphergoth 02 August 2011 06:54:49PM *  14 points [-]

If you are currently donating everything you practically can to charity, fair enough, don't sign up for cryonics.

If you think you should but haven't yet, then sign up for cryonics first. As a person with one foot in the future, you're more likely to do what the future will most benefit from. As someone who avoids thoughtful spending because you feel like you should spend it on charity, you'll end up at XKCD 871.

Comment author: steven0461 02 August 2011 09:51:43PM 4 points [-]

As a person with one foot in the future

Cryonics only makes the difference between your seeing the future and your not seeing the future if 1) sufficiently high tech eventually gets developed by human-friendly actors, 2) it happens only after you die, 3) cryonics works, 4) nothing else goes wrong or makes cryonics irrelevant. For the median LessWronger, I would put maybe a 10% probability on the first two combined and maybe at most a 50% probability on the last two combined. So maybe at best I'd say something like cryonics gives you two and a half toes in a future where you used to have two toes.

Comment author: ciphergoth 02 August 2011 10:30:46PM *  3 points [-]

I mean "one foot in the future" to refer to your resulting psychological state, not to a fact related to your likely personal future. I think it's pretty unlikely I'll be suspended and reanimated - many other fates are more likely, including never being declared dead. But I think signing up is a move towards a different attitude to the future.

Comment author: steven0461 02 August 2011 10:45:10PM 4 points [-]

But I think signing up is a move towards a different attitude to the future.

Is this just a plausible guess, or do we have other evidence that it's true, e.g. people spontaneously citing being signed up for cryonics as causing them to feel the future is real enough to help optimally philanthropize into existence?

Comment author: ciphergoth 03 August 2011 06:55:19AM 1 point [-]

It's a guess.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 August 2011 08:31:30PM 0 points [-]

If there were a one-and-done answer, I think this'd be it.