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Swimmer963 comments on Why I haven't signed up for cryonics - Less Wrong
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I think this is why it feels squicky trying to assign a monetary value to my life; part of me thinks it's selfish to assign any more value to my life than Givewell's stated cost to save a stranger's life ($1700-ish??) But I know I value it more than that. I wouldn't risk my life for a paycheck.
Do you drive to work?
I bike, which might be worse but also might be better; depends how much the added lifespan from physical fitness trades off against the risk of an accident. And the risk is very likely less than 1/1000 given the years that I've been biking accident-free, so there's a multiplication there.
I rather suspect it depends primarily on where you bike. Biking through streets of Manhattan has different risk than biking on rural Wyoming roads.
Driving under the same conditions has similar risk disparity.
I rather doubt that -- do you have data?
I seem to remember the answer being that cycling is more dangerous per mile than driving, but that the increase in physical fitness more than compensates in all-cause mortality terms. The first paper I found seems to point to the same conclusion.
I don't know how that would be adjusted in someone that already has fitness habits. It probably also depends on how well developed the cycling infrastructure in your town is, but I've never seen any actual data on that either.
In my experience bicycling is much safer. I have been cycling more or less everyday since I was at least since I was 8. and have never been in a life-threatening accident. however, while traveling by car, I have been in 2 or 3 potential life threatening crashes. But this will be very dependent of location culture and personal variables.
Do you know of a safer way to commute that lets you keep the same range of possible jobs?
I bet you would. Lots of jobs have components (such as extra stress, less physical activity, or living in a dangerous or dirty city) that reduce life expediency. Unless you pick the job which maximizes your life span, you would effectively be risking your life for a paycheck. Tradeoffs are impossible to escape, even if you don't explicitly think about them.
In context, it seems uncharitable to read "risk my life" to include any risk small enough that taking it would still be consistent with valuing one's own life far above $1700.
If you got a lethal disease with a very expensive treatment, and you could afford it, would you refuse the treatment? What would the threshold price be? Does this idea feel as squicky as spending on cryonics?
Depends: has the treatment been proven to work before?
(Yes, I've heard the probability calculations. I don't make medical decisions based on plausibility figures when it has simply never been seen to work before, even in animal models.)
Part of shutting up and multiplying is multiplying through the probability of a payoff with the value of the payoff, and then treating it as a guaranteed gain of that much utility. This is a basic property of rational utility functions.
(I think. People who know what they're talking about, feel free to correct me)
You are correct regarding expected-utility calculations, but I make an epistemic separation between plausabilities and probabilities. Plausible means something could happen without contradicting the other things I know about reality. Probable means there is actually evidence something will happen. Expected value deals in probabilities, not plausibilities.
Now, given that cryonics has not been seen to work on, say, rats, I don't see why I should expect it to already be working on humans. I am willing to reevaluate based on any evidence someone can present to me.
Of course, then there's the question of what happens on the other side, so to speak, of who is restoring your preserved self and what they're doing with you. Generally, every answer I've heard to that question made my skin crawl.
Remember, your life has instrumental value others don't; if you risk your life for a paycheck, you're risking all future paychecks as well as your own life-value. The same applies to stressing yourself out obsessively working multiple jobs, robbing banks, selling your redundant organs ... even simply attempting to spend all your money on charity and the cheapest of foods tends too be a fairly bad suggestion for the average human (although if you think you can pull it off, great!)