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Eudoxia comments on Finally Ending My Cryo-Crastination - Less Wrong
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Sure, the fact that Ben Best experimented on a patient, ruining his perfusion (Emphasis mine):
Mike Darwin believes they are providing substandard care, certainly not enough to ensure the possibility of revival.
And the fact that they are licensed as a cemetery, and at any time the state can decide that cryonics doesn't work and thaw everyone.
I am aware of the limitations and flaws of the CI, having read of them, among other places, in the various cryonics posts here at LW. However, I am also aware of the other limitations and flaws of Alcor that have also been posted. Neither organization offers a perfect solution - so I've weighed my options, including my physical proximity to CI's storage facility and my finances, and made my choice. I've been hesitating on this for far too long, and at this point, I feel it's better to simply pick either one rather than not pick one at all.
We need more discussion about forming the best personal strategy for when CI and/or Alcor fail and/or a better organization appears.
Sounds like good fodder for a top-level article.
My current strategy is only useful if a better alternative to CI appears while I'm still alive. I currently plan on avoiding the lifetime membership at CI, instead going for the annual membership; and arranging the insurance so that I'll be able to stop payments if need be, thus allowing for a relatively clean severance between myself and CI.
One possibility might be to join a group of like-minded individuals, such as the Society for Venturism, who are preparing to help their cryo-preserved members as necessary.
The trouble is as follows:
Any cryonics organization that makes a plausible public pledge to care for the patients of future cryonics orgs that fail suddenly accepts some risk. (Though much of the cost of cryonics is the initial procedure, there would also be transport and secure warehousing costs associated with accepting the patients of a failed org.) This cost is most likely passed on to its current members.
Any cryonics organization that does not make such a pledge can therefore provide cheaper care at a comparable standard, with the added benefit that in the event of failure, the patients of these orgs will be transferred to an org of the first type, should any exist.
One solution, as far as I can tell, is for orgs that wish to be of the first type make a plausible promise to not adopt outside patients, but then make "one-time exceptions" where possible when other orgs fail. (By analogy with Kant's practice regarding marriage.)
Why are you in such a hurry?
It seems to me that if there are no credible options to extend you lifespan beyond what curent medical science can do, it's best to just wait for one to show up rather than committing to a weak option with a negligible chance of succeding.
Of course, it's entirely possible that such a strong option will never materialize during your lifetime, in which case you would just have avoided wasting your money and effort.
From HPMoR, chapter 66, paragraphs 1-4:
I've previously looked a bit into cryonics, and flinched at how expensive the full package from Alcor was, especially given my fixed income. I thought something along the lines, "I want to sign up, but there's no way I can afford that. Maybe if the prices drop before I die.", and turned my attention to other matters. During my most recent looking into the matter, I looked more thoroughly into the matter. For example, I ran a few online insurance-quote generators, and found that, given my age and non-smoker status, the necessary life-insurance would only run me around $15/month.
If a better option materializes while I'm still alive, then it seems unlikely that my having signed up for cryonics now will prevent me from taking advantage of it. So, by signing up now, I have the advantage of not having cut off my future options, as well as having the cryonics package in case I do kick the bucket before then. If the LW arguments for cryonics add up, then I no longer have any good reason to delay; and, as far as I can tell, they do.
Well, since you are citing Yudkowsky...
That would be useful advice only for an agent with unbounded rationality. A boundedly rational agent like an human can't possibly plan in advance for every possible contingency.
Hesitation is not necessarily, or even usually, a bad thing: it's an emotion that warns you against making important decisions without having extensively thought about all the options. Of course, too much hesitation can be crippling.
Yes, but if the option you choose has negligible probability of succeding, then, with overwhelming probability you waste your money. 30 $ per month may not be much money for you, but you could as well spend them in lottery tickets and their expected utility would be in the same ballpark (that is, negligibly greater than zero).
It seems to me that the arguments against outweight the arguments in favor. In particular:
I don't see this adressed in the arguments in favor.
How inexpensive do you feel signing up for cryonics would have to be, before you considered it worthwhile to pay for?
A precise answer would depend on the probability of success, which I believe to be very low and difficult to estimate precisely, and on the payoff in case of success (some people believe that you wake up as an essentially immortal entity in a post-scarcity world, Robin Hanson believes that you wake up as a brain upload who has to slave his way through a Malthusian society, etc.)
Given the state of the uncertainties involved, my position is that unless someone provides a compelling argument for the probability of cryonics success being non-negligible, then any amount of money spent on it is a bad investment. You should not give in Pascal's muggings.
Even if they were given it away for free, the effort and social costs may not be not be worth the expected payoff. Think of joining a religion: there is a technically non-zero probability that it will save your soul, but unless you are given evidence that this probability is non-negligible, this is not a good reason for joining, even if it is free.
There might be also social benefits, however. Joining an organized religion signals allegiance and gains you status within the community of its adherents. Likewise, signing up for cryonics signals allegiance and gains you status within the communities where cryonics is popular, mainly the transhumanist/singularitarian groups.
I suspect that the reason cryonics is relatively popular among the OB/LW folks is that Hanson and Yudkowsky strongly endorse it. Siding with the alphas is an easy way to gain status.
Alright - if that's a datum you need to have before you give an answer, then what would your answer be if the best estimate possible for that probability was 50%? Or 5%? Or 0.05%?
If that's a datum you need, then in what way would you need that payoff described, measured, and/or estimated before you could give an answer, and for a few plausible payoffs, what would your answer be?
... Is that an indirect way of saying that you don't consider yourself to be one of the 'OB/LW folk' yourself?
Assuming that in case of success your lifespan is increased by 50 years, and your quality of life is essentially unchanged, then:
For p = 50%, I would consider cryonics a standard life-saving medical procedure, thus I would spend on it as much as it takes as long as I can afford it without impairing my immediate survival.
For p = 5% I would consider cryonics an experimental medical procedure. I would spend on it up to about 1/10 - 2/10 of my discretionary income.
I'm here just for the discussions, I don't feel any sense of belonging to a community that some people here seem to have.
For p = 0.05% I would doubt that the estimate is actually correct to the fourth significant figure. If I can be assured that it is, then I'd say I'll spend about 1/1000 (edited) of my discretionary income. If I can't be assured that the estimate is correct, I'll spend nothing.
0.05% (i.e. 0.0005) is a number expressed to four decimal places, but only one significant figure.
If it's not too personal a question to ask, what's the order-of-magnitude of your discretionary income? (Or, if you prefer; does $300/year fall within the range of any of your described spending amounts?)
I try to think of probabilities in terms of logarithms these days. 0.05% is roughly -26 decibans of confidence, which might help you look at it in a way that avoids the significant-figure difficulty.
Life insurance is cheaper when young. If you have an accident you can die without having time to sign up.
If. DataPacRat obviously believes both Alcor and CI to be credible options. Do you wish to make a case against that?
Not exceptionally cheaper compared to the money you will spend on it before you will need it. In any case, you can always subscribe to life insurance naming a relative or a charity as beneficiary and then change the beneficiary if needed.
If you die in a car accident your brain will be most likely heavily damaged by direct trauma and/or ischemia before cryopreservation can be attempted.
It's not obvious from what he wrote. He could be reasoning along the lines of a Pascal's wager/Pascal's mugging argument, in which case, he would be incurring in a fallacy.
This isn't exactly the case. CI accepted licensure as a cemetery in 2004 without giving up any of its legal claims, and reached an agreement acknowledging its many differences from traditional cemeteries. And more recently, as you can read here: