.03 seems really high for messing up the paperwork. Sure you might mess up the initial paperwork but then it will be noticed and fixed.
Do we know how common it is for someone who thought they were signed up for cryonics to not actually be frozen because something was screwed up with the paperwork? There's the cryonics organization, life insurance, and your will. Maybe other things?
.06 seems too low for chance of dying in a circumstance where they can't preserve you. Especially if one isn't very old, the chance of death from sudden trauma is much higher than other forms of death.
If I die now (age 25) then yes, it's most likely to be because of an accident. But I'm also unlikely to die now. Looking at overall causes of death, 5% of american deaths in 2007 were due to "accidents (unintentional injuries)". Another 0.8% were due to homicide. I assumed that within the 18.6% of 'other' there might be ~0.2% of other similar things.
I could die of something like a heart attack while far from a hospital or something, though. So I should probably raise this probability to account for that. Do we know how common it is for people to die suddenly, of all causes (excluding accidents and homicide, which I'm already assuming are 100% no-freeze)?
Would 0.20 be better?
One can in many places (and the number of places is growing) engage in euthanasia. Even in the US people can directly take steps to drastically decrease their lifespans such as by self-starvation.
I don't know if I would want to be euthanized/frozen if I thought my chances of revival were this low.
Alzheimer's also has a very large genetic component, so if no one in one's family got it one is probably safe.
In my case, I don't think I have had any relatives with it. For the general case, I should probably put in a note.
I don't know why you think the cryonic's company running out of capacity should be that likely
Something might kill a lot of people at once. This is unlikely, but is it more than 1% unlikely?
If a company goes insolvent, unless this happens just when you are dying, switching to another insurance company should not be hard.
I had thought life insurance worked such that if when I'm 60 my company goes bust getting a new policy would be prohibitively expensive?
You seem to be underestimating the risk of anti-cryonics laws. There's already such a law in British Columbia.
I didn't know about this. That is worrysome. Would you put it closer to 0.25?
You also seem to be assuming that extraction of information from the brain is the only possible option rather than direct revival.
I am. Direct revival seems really impractical to me. Should it?
I also don't know how you are combining these various probabilities. This could drastically alter the probability.
I convert all the probabilities of failure to probabilities of success by subtracting them from 1. Then I multiply them all and subtract the result from one:
P(failure) = 1-P(success)
P(total_success) = P(success_a)*P(success_b)*P(success_c)*...
This seemed to me to be the only way to do it, so I didn't remark on it. Is this actually the right way to do it? Are there other ways that I should have considered? (I tried to deal with independence in footnote 3)
Do we know how common it is for someone who thought they were signed up for cryonics to not actually be frozen because something was screwed up with the paperwork?
I'm not aware of any such cases. Perhaps someone more involved with cryonics can comment on this?
As to accidental death and related issues- I'm not sure. Given your analysis you've added in this comment I'm more inclined to accept your original number.
Something might kill a lot of people at once. This is unlikely, but is it more than 1% unlikely?
Well, if something killed a lot of people i...
If an American signs up for cryonics and pays their ~$300/year, what are their odds of being revived? Talking to people at LessWrong meetups I've heard estimates of 1 in 2. My friend George Dahl, whose opinion I respect a lot, guesses "less than 1 in 10^6". Niether has given me reasons, those numbers are opaque. My estimate of these odds pretty much determines whether I should sign up. I could afford $300/year, and I would if I thought the odds were 1:2, but not if they were 1:10^6. [1]
In order to see how likely this is to work, we should look at the process. I would sign up with a cryonics company and for life insurance. I'd go on living, enjoying my life and the people around me, paying my annual fees, until some point when I died. After death they would drain my blood, replace it with something that doesn't rupture cell walls when it freezes, freeze me in liquid nitrogen, and leave me there for a long time. At some point, probably after the development of nanotechnology, people would revive me, probably as a computer program.
There's a lot of steps there, and it's easy to see ways they could go wrong. [3] Let's consider some cases and try to get probabilities [4]:
Update: the probabilities below are out of date, and only useful for understanding the comments. I've made a spreadsheet listing both my updated probabilities and those for as many other people as I can find: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...
Combined Probability Of Failure: 99.82%
Odds of success: 1 in 567.
If you can think of other ways cryonics might fail, moving probability mass from "other" to something more quantifiable, that would be helpful. If you think my numbers are off for something, please let me know what a better number would be and why. This is not final.
Am I going about this right? Do people here who think it's rational to sign up for cryonics take a "the payoff is really high, so the small probability doesn't matter" view? Am I overly pessimistic about its chances of success?
Note: I originally posted this on my blog, and the version there has a silly javascript calculator for playing with the probabilities.
[1] To figure out what odds I would accept, I think the right approach is to treat this as if I were considering signing up for something certain and see how much I would pay, then see what odds bring this below $300/year. Even at 1:2 odds this is less effective than Village Reach at averting death [2], so this needs to come out of my 'money spent on me' budget. I think $10,000/year is about the most I'd be willing to spend. It's a lot, but not dying would be pretty nice. This means I'd need odds of 1:33 to sign up.
[2] Counter argument: you should care about quality adjusted life years and not deaths averted. Someone revived maybe should expect to have millenia of life at very high quality. This seems less likely to me than just the claim "will be revived". A lot less likely.
[3] In order to deal with independence issues, all my probability guesses are conditional on everything above them not happening. Each of these things must go right, so this works. For example, society collapsing and my cryonics organization going out of business are very much not independent. So the probability assigned to the latter is the chance that society won't collapse, but my organization goes out of business anyway. This means I can just multiply up the subelements to get probabilities for sections, and then multiply up sections to get an overall probability.
[4] This has a lot in common with the Warren formula, which was inspired by the Drake equation. Robin Hanson also has a breakdown. I also found a breakdown on LessWrong that seems really optimistic.
EDIT 2011-09-26: jsalvatier suggested an online spreadsheet, which is very sensible. Created
EDIT 2011-09-27: I've updated my probabilities some, and made the updates on the spreadsheet.