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Swimmer963 comments on Why I haven't signed up for cryonics - Less Wrong
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It feels to me like the general pro-cryo advocacy here would be a bit of a double standard, at least when compared to general memes of effective altruism, shutting up and multiplying, and saving the world. If I value my life equally to the lives of others, it seems pretty obvious that there's no way by which the money spent on cryonics would be a better investment than spending it on general do-gooding.
Of course, this is not a new argument, and there are a few standard responses to it. The first one is that I don't actually value my life equally to that of everyone else's life, and that it's inconsistent to appeal to that when I don't appeal to it in my life in general. And it's certainly true that I do actually value my own life more than I value the life of a random stranger, but I do that because I'm human and can't avoid it, not because my values would endorse that as a maximally broad rule. If I get a chance to actually act in accordance to my preferred values and behave more altruistically than normal, I'll take it.
The other standard argument is that cryonics doesn't need to come out of my world-saving budget, it can come out of my leisure budget. Which is also true, but it requires that I'm interested enough in cryonics that I get enough fuzzy points from buying cryonics to make up whatever I lose in exchange. And it feels like once you take the leisure budget route, you're implicitly admitting that this is about purchasing fuzzies, not utilons, which makes it a little odd to apply to all those elaborate calculations which are often made with a strong tone of moral obligation. If one is going to be a utilitarian and use the strong tone of moral obligation, one doesn't get to use it to make the argument that one should invest a lot of money on saving just a single person, and with highly uncertain odds at that.
By going with the leisure budget argument, one is essentially admitting that cryonics isn't about altruism, it's about yourself. And of course, there is nothing wrong with that, since none of us is a 100% complete altruist who cares nothing about themselves, nor should we even try to idealize that kind of a person. And I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with signing up for cryonics - everyone gets to use their fuzzies budget the way they prefer, and if cryonices gives you the most fuzzies, cool. But if one doesn't get major fuzzies out of cryo, then that ought to be considered just as reasonable as well.
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!)