Eneasz comments on Survey of older folks as data about one's future values and preferences? - Less Wrong

18 Post author: Bart119 27 April 2012 07:42PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (42)

Comments (42)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Eneasz 27 April 2012 10:02:57PM *  9 points [-]

Cryonics as it is right now is expensive, but not ridiculously so ($28,000 at CI ). If everyone was cryo-persevered at death the cost per person would drop dramatically. Meanwhile medical costs during the last year of life are already high: "Studies have shown that the 5% of Medicare patients who die each year account for 30% of Medicare's costs, with 78% of last-year-of-life expenses occurring in the month before death." here.

Dying costs, on average, $10k-$35k depending on where you live your last few months.

These costs are more likely to increase than to decrease. And they buy very few QALY (or even just plain non-adjusted years). Calling it quits a few months early and getting cryo-preserved could very well be a net savings once it's a widely available option. And, if it ends up working, would have a much greater return in QALY.

Comment author: gwern 28 April 2012 01:26:24AM 14 points [-]

If everyone was cryo-persevered at death the cost per person would drop dramatically.

Mike Darwin, FWIW, disagrees strongly. You might be able to get economies of scale for the storage part, but that was never a significant chunk of the cost. And formalizing procedures do not necessarily drive net prices down, as the massive decades-long increases in medical costs in the US and worldwide show...

Comment author: magfrump 30 April 2012 05:48:16AM 0 points [-]

I realize that there are links for this everywhere in various cryonics discussions, but this seems like a post ripe for having a link or a quote in it.

I upvoted anyway since I'm sure it would be easy for me to find such a link too.

...Actually, why don't I go ahead and do that.

...Because searching less wrong gives me long articles whose references I would need to comb and googling "mike darwin increasing cost cryonics" doesn't give me anything insightful without some more in depth searches which someone (in fact almost certain gwern) has already done and could do more easily than I.

Comment author: gwern 30 April 2012 03:36:50PM 1 point [-]

Not from searching, just from reading Chronopause mostly. I'm not sure there's any one place for it - doing a site search for 'economies of scale' turns up http://chronopause.com/index.php/2011/02/26/response-to-maxim%E2%80%99s-rant-about-automation-in-cardiopulmonary-bypass/

Aschwin de Wolf has made something of a “hobby” or perhaps study out of monitoring gross waste of this kind in cryonics, and he has come up with a conclusion, with which I largely agree, that the more money you throw at cryonics (in general) the LESS results you will get. In other words, it is not just that the results don’t scale with the increased funding, but rather that positive return decreases, grinds to a halt, and result can actually become harmful! It’s seem to operate somewhat analogously to government involvement in astronautics. They spend massive amounts of money, produce dangerous garbage that fails in all of its primary missions (e.g., the Shuttle), AND they serve as a spoiler for the creation of viable alternatives. The latter is particularly pernicious. These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. I wish Aschwin would write an article about these observations and his synthesis and let me publish here on Chronosphere or, failing that, that he post it on Depressed Metabolism.

You know, for many years in cryonics people have wished for two things with both great longing and great frequency: 1) that a really famous person get’s frozen, and 2) that millionaires start pumping money into cryonics. All of this reminds me of the quote from St. Theresa of Avila: “Answered prayers cause more tears than those that remain unanswered”.

Which seems shorter and more informal than I remember his assessment being.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit