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Alicorn comments on How to get cryocrastinators to actually sign up for cryonics - Less Wrong
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If anyone else dislikes Rudi the way I do (and doesn't need his help to get signed up at all), my life insurance company is pretty okay; they're called New York Life. I picked them off a list of cryo-friendly insurance companies Alcor provided in an info packet (even though I went with CI) and they have been very responsive and are willing to conduct all relevant business without the use of telephones (which criterion is part of how I narrowed down said list).
Can you elaborate on why you don't like Rudi? (Or, if you've already done so, provide a link?)
(PM is also fine if you'd prefer.)
Behold.
About how much work did it take you to set up your policy?
Modest, doable amounts of paperwork; and a guy came to my house to get samples and I had uncooperative veins so that took awhile.
Thanks. "Modest" and "doable" are relative; how many hours did you put in?
I wasn't timing it and am extremely prone to multitasking, so I can give you no reliable amount.
Was it more like 1 hour, 10 hours, or 100 hours?
Also, about how many days total went by between receiving the paperwork and completing it?
It was probably more like 1 hour than like 10.
I don't remember.
Can you elaborate on your reason for choosing CI? Was it driven by reasons other than cost?
The websites for both are poorly designed and the only thing I could figure out was that maybe under some circumstances CI was cheaper. Not being able to distinguish between relevant features, and feeling it fairly urgent that I stop dithering and start signing up, I blatantly substituted Eliezer's judgment for my own and went with the one he picked.
Eliezer's judgement was that he had to get signed up to convince people to do the same. And he didn't have much money.
IIRC, when people asked him why he had chosen CI whereas Robin Hanson had chosen Alcor, he said he didn't have that much money but Hanson did, so of course he would pick the cheap option and Hanson the high-end one.
Well, that works out. I don't have much money either.
Why the urgency?
Even assuming that cryonics works as advertised (which is probably a very strong assumption, but I digress), it's probably a bad idea to sign up before 45 - 50. You are very unlikely to die younger, and if you do, whatever kills you will probably destroy much of your brain before you can be cryopreserved.
Sure, life insurance prices go up with age, but assuming a normal career you will probably more than compensate with increased income and possibly savings.
Source? Sure, the leading cause of death below about 35 seems to be car accidents (and traumatic injuries in general), but looking at http://www.theegglestongroup.com/writing/deathstats/deathstats_2007_all_by_age.php, that's still only about 41% violent accidents, furthermore, from these sources it looks like only about 1/3 of deaths by traumatic injury are due to traumatic brain injury, so -- bumping that up to 1/2, since an injury can involve TBI without that being the "cause of death" -- we have about a 20.5% chance of brain trauma given death by injury. Add 27% for homocide (~13%) and suicide (~14%), after which I assume you're unlikely to cryonically preserved soon enough, and you've got about a 50% chance of cryonics being applicable if you do die.
Surely some people would find that sufficient reason to sign up, unless I've missed something? (This pseudo-survey of figures was hacked together quickly very late at night when I wondered about the statistics of it.)
Patterns-Of-Injury-MVAS:
"In the western world, the most common cause of death after trauma is severe brain injury."
Moreover, other than direct traumatic injury, the brain can be also damaged by ischemia: 4-6 minutes of cardiac arrest are typically enough to cause irreversible brain injury, and more than one hour will pretty much destroy the brain tissue.
According to that article:
"In modern day civilian trauma centres, thoracic injury directly accounts for 20-25% of deaths due to trauma; thoracic injury or its complications are a contributing factor in a further 25% of trauma deaths [24]."
"Aortic injuries cause or contribute to 15% of MVA fatalities[25]. Most patients with blunt aortic injury die before they reach hospital, and the vast majority will have major coexisting thoracic and extrathoracic injuries[26]."
I'm not a doctor, but if I understand correctly, this means that most victims of fatal accidents, even those without traumatic brain injury, will reach the hospital already in cardiac arrest or with some condition that will progress to cardiac arrest within few hours. I suppose that in order to arrange prompt cryopreservation you need at least 1 - 2 days of warning.
So, according to your stats, I would say that in the age group you consider, about 70% of deaths wouldn't allow prompt cryopreservation. Factor in the fact that you are unlikely to die in that age group anyway, and you cryonics at that age is probably not worth the cost, even assuming that it works as advertised.
Of course, this ultimately depends on how much you value your life versus your money: I suppose that manypeople have a knee-jerk reaction and say that they value their life an essentially infinite amount of money, but their actual preferences revealed by their spending behavior will probably be different.
By default, one does not sign up at all. I wanted to sign up at all. So I decided to prioritize getting on that. (I don't claim to be able to follow any relevant math about the value of life insurance at various ages.) I am not arranging my life in such a way that I expect my income to follow a particular trend.
Also, if you are very young, it's likely that anti-agathics will be invented during your natural lifespan, and you'll achieve negligible senescence without ever being vitrified and reanimated in the first place.
You know, ‘normal’ careers are becoming rarer and rarer these days. There are lots of people in late twenties or thirties today who haven't found a stable job yet. (My mother is in her forties and she still hasn't...)
In that case paying premiums would be quite difficult
I dunno, how much cheaper are they if one buys life insurance when in their 20s? IIRC they are very cheap for First World standards.
That's an interesting criterion. Why was that so important to you? I was under the impression you weren't deaf.
Not deaf, just hate phones and am very much aware of my tendency to just not make calls even when I really should.
I have the same tendency... I find it a lot of work to hold a conversation even with a friend–my mom is pretty much the only person I can comfortably have a phone chat with, probably because she has a very loud, clear voice and because she isn't unpredictable. Calling strangers, or answering a call which I think is from a stranger i.e. my phone/Internet provider company, is stressful. I'll put off phone calls as long as I possibly can, although I'm not sure if it's because of the anxiety or just because they're more time consuming than writing an email.
I've been working on this by forcing myself to offer to make any necessary phone calls at my current job (at the hospital). This is stressful because a) it's usually to strangers, i.e. a patient's family, a doctor, or the X-ray department, and b) it's in French, my second language. The act of saying "oh, I'll take care of that phone call for you" is both easy and rewarding, because I like being really really helpful, and then once I've said I'll do it, I'm committed and I have to do it. Weirdly enough, I'm still scared to answer the phone at work.
Disliking answering phones is part of a long list of semi-phobias I had as a kid–ordering food in restaurants, going up to the checkout to buy things in stores, etc. I still get anxious ordering drinks in a bar. It feels like this is part of the same category as my phone-phobia.
So, I'm not the only one. (I've partly overcome this, but I still prefer to only use the telephone for extremely short conversations (30 seconds or less) or when it's the only available medium for communicating with a given person.
Yep, same here. My hearing is fine, but trying to understand speech through a telephone is a chore unless I'm in a very quiet room, and even then I can't hear the other party if they interrupt me.
Is it possible that you have an auditory processing disorder? My fiancee has it and this sounds pretty much like her experience with phones.
Mm. I'll make an appointment with my doctor today.
Cell phones have notably worse audio quality than landlines. Are landline-to-landline calls also a problem?
It's been a while since I've used a landline. Since the quality is better, I'd expect there to be less of a problem.
Do you know what the reason for your phone aversion is?
Partly the fact that speech on the phone is sometimes harder to understand, and partly some kind of aversion to non-trivial conversations with someone I don't have visual contact with, where written text counts as visual. Not sure why that is.
I have some aversion to phone calls and prefer skype's visual connection. My guess is that's because if I don't have anything to focus my eyes on, I'm more likely to see my body language and notice I'm nervous. And noticing that might make me more nervous.
I'm unsure whether I experience anything similar with email - I think I like email because I can take more time to reply.
I have a friend who is like that, although she does not like emails, either. Not sure about skype. I could never elicit a coherent explanation from her why physical presence is so important for information exchange. Must be some genetic factor.
There's an emotional side-channel face to face, from expressions and body-language. All unconscious until you start to learn how it works, but it's still there. It helps to avoid misunderstandings, talking at cross purposes, accidental offence, etc.
Missing that side channel is why e-mails and posts turn into flame wars, and writing clearly enough and reading carefully enough to avoid all these things makes e-mails take endless time compared with face-to-face. Same with written letters, of course.
Perhaps your friend had some early bad experiences with phone calls and e-mails caused by this, and formed an aversion?
I greatly prefer conversation (face-to-face or phone call, they seem similar) because the bandwidth and latency are so much better. And I avoid writing e-mails to the point where I phone back if it's important and don't answer otherwise. Like text messages, they only seem useful to communicate one-to-many or if you don't want to disturb someone. (And for flirting!)
Anyone agree, and have we discovered an interesting difference here or is it just a preference?
I'm forty-two, but I'm fairly technologically sophisticated and had e-mail from twenty-one on (and far prefer it to writing letters!)
I loathe phones with a deep and personal passion. I can function well in text, and I can do just fine in person, but my conversation skills just fail miserably with the combination of time pressure and missing non-verbal cues on the telephone.
I really couldn't say; my dislike of using telephones follows straight from being hard of hearing, so I have no idea what my preferences would or would not be in a counterfactual universe.
I like phones. (for me skype call is basically the same as a phone call). But i mostly use loud speaker. I could imagine a few more reasons why someone wouldnt like phones. It seems odd to make this an actual criterion, but good if companies can deal with it.