Cryonics success is an highly conjunctive event, depending on a number of different, roughly independent, events to happen.
Consider this list:
Cryocompanies actually implement the cryorpreservation process susbstantially as advertised, without botching or faking it, or generally behaving incompetently. I think there is a significant (>= 50%) probability that they don't: there have been anecdotal allegations of mis-behavior, at least one company (the Cryonics Institute) has policies that betray gross incompetence or disregard for the success of the procedure ( such as keeping certain cryopatients on dry ice for two weeks ), and more generally, since cryocompanies operate without public oversight and without any mean to assess the quality of their work, they have every incentive to hide mistakes, take cost-saving shortcuts, use sub-par materials, equipment, unqualified staff, or even outright defrau
You forgot "You will die in a way that keeps your brain intact and allows you to be cryopreserved".
"... by an expert team with specialized equipment within hours (minutes?) of your death."
(My version of) the above is essentially my reason for thinking cryonics is unlikely to have much value.
There's a slightly subtle point in this area that I think often gets missed. The relevant question is not "how likely is it that cryonics will work?" but "how likely is it that cryonics will both work and be needed?". A substantial amount of the probability that cryonics does something useful, I think, comes from scenarios where there's huge technological progress within the next century or thereabouts (because if it takes longer then there's much less chance that the cryonics companies are still around and haven't lost their patients in accidents, wars, etc.) -- but conditional on that it's quite likely that the huge technological progress actually happens fast enough that someone reasonably young (like Chris) ends up getting magical life extension without needing to die and be revived first.
So the window within which there's value in signing up for cryonics is where huge progress happens soon but not too soon. You're betting on an upper as well as a lower bound to the rate of progress.
There's a slightly subtle point in this area that I think often gets missed.
I have seen a number of people make (and withdraw) this point, but it doesn't make sense, since both the costs and benefits change (you stop buying life insurance when you no longer need it, so costs decline in the same ballpark as benefits).
Contrast with the following question:
"Why buy fire insurance for 2014, if in 2075 anti-fire technology will be so advanced that fire losses are negligible?"
You pay for fire insurance this year to guard against the chance of fire this year. If fire risk goes down, the price of fire insurance goes down too, and you can cancel your insurance at will.
That would make sense if you were doing something like buying a lifetime cryonics subscription upfront that could not be refunded even in part. But it doesn't make sense with actual insurance, where you stop buying it if is no longer useful, so costs are matched to benefits.
So, in your scenario:
True. While the effect would still exist due to front-loading it would be smaller than I assumed . Thank you for pointing this out to me.
I'll bite. (I don't want the money. If I get it, I'll use it for what is considered by some on this site as ego-gratifying wastage for Give Directly or some similar charity.)
If you look around, you'll find "scientist"-signed letters supporting creationism. Philip Johnson, a Berkeley law professor is on that list, but you find a very low percertage of biologists. If you're using lawyers to sell science, you're doing badly. (I am a lawyer.)
The global warming issue has better lists of people signing off, including one genuinely credible human: Richard Lindzen of MIT. Lindzen, though, has oscillated from "manmade global warming is a myth," to a more measured view that the degree of manmade global warming is much, much lower than the general view. The list of signatories to a global warming skeptic letter contains some people with some qualifications on the matter, but many who do not seem to have expertise.
Cryonics? Well, there's this. Assuming they would put any neuroscience qualifications that the signatories had... this looks like the intelligent design letters. Electrical engineers, physicists... let's count the people with neuroscience expertise, other than peo...
let's count the people with neuroscience expertise, other than people whose careers are in hawking cryonics
This is a little unfair: if you have neuroscience experience and think cryonics is very important, then going to work for Alcor or CI may be where you can have the most impact. At which point others note that you're financially dependent on people signing up for cryonics and write you off as biased.
In a world where cryonics were obviously worthwhile to anyone with neuroscience expertise, one would expect to see many more cryonics-boosting neuroscientists than could be employed by Alcor and CI. Indeed, you might expect there to be more major cryonics orgs than just those two.
In other words, it's only unfair if we think size of the "neuroscientist" pool is roughly comparable to the size of the market for cryonics researchers. It's not, so IMO JRMayne raises an interesting point, and not one I'd considered before.
I'm glad you attached your bounty to a concrete action (cancelling your cryonics subscription) rather than something fuzzy like "convincing me to change my mind". When someone offers a bounty for the latter I cynically expect them to use motivated cognition to explain away any evidence presented, and then refuse to pay out even if the evidence is very strong. (While you might still end up doing that here, the bounty is at least tied to an unambiguously defined action.)
Supposing that you get convinced that a cryonics subscription isn't worth having for you.
What's the likelihood that it's just one person offering a definitive argument rather than a collaborative effect? If the latter, will you divide the $500?
It is likely that you would not wish for your brain-state to be available to all-and-sundry, subjecting you to the possibility of being simulated according to their whims. However, you know nothing about the ethics of the society that will exist when the technology to extract and run your brain-state is developed. Thus you are taking a risk of a negative outcome that may be less attractive to you than mere non-existence.
You have read the full kalla724 thread, right?
I think V_V's comment is sufficient for you to retract your cryonics subscription. If we get uFAI you lose anyways, so I would be putting my money into that and other existential risks. You'll benefit a lot more people that way.
I had read some of that thread, and just went and made a point of reading any comments by kalla724 that I had missed. Actually, I had them in mind when I made this thread - hoping that $500 could induce a neuroscientist to write the post kalla724 mentioned (but as far as I can tell never wrote), or or else be willing to spend a few hours fielding questions from me about cryonics. I considered PMing kalla724 directly, but they don't seem to have participated in LW in some time.
Edit: PM'd kalla724. Don't expect a response, but seemed worth the 10 seconds on that off-chance.
My objection to cryonics is financial - I'm all for it if you're a millionaire, but most people aren't. For most people, cryonics will eat a giant percentage of your life's total production of wealth, in a fairly faint-hope chance at resurrection. The exact chances are a judgement call, but I'd ballpark it at about 10%, because there's so very many realistic ways that things can go wrong.
If your cryonics insurance is $50/month, unless cryonics is vastly cheaper than I think it is, it's term insurance, and the price will jump drastically over time(2-3x per...
Be aware that you are going to get a very one-sided debate. I am very much pro-cryonics, but you're not going to hear much from me or others like me because (1) I'm not motivated to rehash the supporting arguments, and (2) attaching monetary value actually deentivises me from participating (particularly when I am unlikely to receive it).
ETA: Ok, I said that and then I countered myself by being compelled to respond to this point:
...In particular, I find questions about personal identity and consciousness of uploads made from preserved brains confusing, but t
If it could be done, would you pay $500 for a copy of you to be created tomorrow in a similar but separate alternate reality?(Like an Everette branch that is somewhat close to ours, but faraway enough that you are not already in it?)
Given what we know about identity, etc., this is what you are buying.
Personally, I wouldn't pay five cents.
Unless people that you know and love are also signed up for cryonics? (In which case you ought to sign up, for lots of reasons including keeping them company and supporting their cause.)
Let me attempt to convince you that your resurrection from cryonic stasis has negative expected value, and that therefore it would be better for you not to have the information necessary to reconstruct your mind persist after the event colloquially known as "death," even if such preservation were absolutely free.
Most likely, your resurrection would require technology developed by AI. Since we're estimating the expected value of your resurrection, let's work on the assumption that the AGI will be developed.
Friendly AI is strictly more difficult t...
How low would your estimate have to get before you canceled your subscription? I might try to convince you by writing down something like:
P(CW) = P(CW | CTA) * P(CTA)
Where CW = "cryonics working for you" and CTA = "continued technological advancement in the historical short term", and arguing that your estimate of P(CTA) is probably much too high. Of course, this would only reduce your overall estimate by 10x at most, so if you still value cryonics at P=0.03 instead of P=0.3, it wouldn't matter.
One rational utilitarian argument I haven't seen here but which was brought up in an old thread is that cryonics competes with organ donation.
With organ donation you can save on average more than one life (the thread mentions 3.75, this site says "up to 8") wheras cryonics saves only <0.1 (but your own life).
And you probably can't have both.
Assuming you meant for the comment section to be used to convince you. Not necessarily because you meant it, but because making that assumption means not willfully acting against your wishes on what normally would be a trivial issue that holds no real preference for you. Maybe it would be better to do it with private messages, maybe not. There's a general ambient utility to just making the argument here, so there shouldn't be any fault in doing so.
Since this is a real-world issue rather than a simple matter of crunching numbers, what you're really asking f...
This post inspired me to quickly do this calculation. I did not know what the answer would be when I started. It could convince you in either direction really, depending on your level of self/altruism balance and probability estimate.
Cost of neuro-suspension cryonics > $20,000
Cost of saving a single life via effective altruism, with high certainty < $5,000
Let's say you value a good outcome with a mostly-immortal life at X stranger's regular-span lives.
Let "C" represent the threshold of certainty that signing up for cryonics causes that go...
Given that you believe that unfriendly AI is likely, I think one of the best arguments against cryonics is that you do not want to increase the probability of being "resurrected" by "something". But this concerns the forbidden topic, so I can't get into more details here. For hints see Iain M. Banks' novel Surface detail on why you might want to be extremely risk averse when it comes to the possibility of waking up in a world controlled by posthuman uploads.
It's easy to get lost in incidental costs and not realize how they add up over time. If you weren't signed up for cryonics, and you inherited $30K, would you be inclined to dump it in to a cryonics fund, or use it someplace else? If the answer is the latter, you probably don't REALLY value cryonics as much as you think - you've bought in to it because the price is spread out and our brains are bad at budgeting small, reoccurring expenses like that.
My argument is pretty much entirely on the "expense" side of things, but I would also point out that...
Let's suppose your mind is perfectly preserved (in whatever method they choose to use). Let's suppose you retain the continuity of your memories and you still feel you are "you." Let's suppose the future society is kinder, nicer, less wasteful, more tolerant, and every kid owns a puppy. Let's suppose the end of fossil fuels didn't destroy civilization because we were wise enough to have an alternative ready in time. Let's suppose we managed to save the ozone layer and reverse global warming and the world is still a more-or-less pleasant place to ...
After I ran my estimates, I concluded that cryonics raised my odds of living to ~90 years old by approximately 5% absolute, from 50% to 55%. It's not very much, but that 5% was enough for me to justify signing up.
I think the most important part is to be honest about the fact that cryonics is a fairly expensive safety net largely consisting of holes. There are many unknowns, it relies on nonexistent technology, and in many scenarios you may become permanently dead before you can be frozen. That said, it does increase your odds of long term survivability.
It's worth mentioning that anyone with a strong argument against cryonics is likely to believe that you will be persuaded by it (due to low base-rates for these kinds of conversions). Thus the financial incentive is not as influential as you would like it to be.
Added: Relevant prediction
I work in software. I once saw a changelog that said something like " * session saving (loading to be implemented in a future version)", and I laughed out loud. The argument in favour of cryonics seems to boil down to "we can't see why revival won't work", which is basically meaningless for a system this complex and poorly-understood. How can we be at all confident that we're preserving memories when we don't even know how they're encoded? I can't predict exactly what crucial thing we will have missed preserving. But I can predict we wi...
I found myself in that situation once.
When I wrote the loader, the saved-game files worked.
Of course, that was because I just took the whole game data object and serialized it into a file stream. Similarly, here, we're storing the actual thing.
Last paragraph: ha. Restoring someone who wasn't frozen requires time travel. If cryo works and time travel doesn't, there you go.
I will pay $500 to anyone who can convince me to NOT X
Is incentivizing yourself to X. Not ideal for being open to genuinely changing your mind.
The definition of science that I prefer is: a theory that can be tested and shown to fail. If a theory gives itself room to always add one more variable and thus never be shown to fail, it might be useful or beautiful or powerful or comforting but it won't be science. Revival 'some day' can always be one more day away, one more variable added.
Pour some milk into water. Now, get the milk back out. Not milk powder, not the milk plus a little water, not 99.9% of the milk and some minerals from the water, just the milk. I don't think it's possible. Now, let your brain die. Freeze it (freezing a live brain will kill it). Then, restart the most complex machine/arrangement of matter known. It just doesn't seem feasible.
I think machines can have consciousness, and I think a copy of you can have consciousness, but you can't have the consciousness of your copy, and it seems to me that after de...
Background:
On the most recent LessWrong readership survey, I assigned a probability of 0.30 on the cryonics question. I had previously been persuaded to sign up for cryonics by reading the sequences, but this thread and particularly this comment lowered my estimate of the chances of cryonics working considerably. Also relevant from the same thread was ciphergoth's comment:
Based on this, I think there's a substantial chance that there's information out there that would convince me that the folks who dismiss cryonics as pseudoscience are essentially correct, that the right answer to the survey question was epsilon. I've seen what seem like convincing objections to cryonics, and it seems possible that an expanded version of those arguments, with full references and replies to pro-cryonics arguments, would convince me. Or someone could just go to the trouble of showing that a large majority of cryobiologists really do think cryopreserved people are information-theoretically dead.
However, it's not clear to me how well worth my time it is to seek out such information. It seems coming up with decisive information would be hard, especially since e.g. ciphergoth has put a lot of energy into trying to figure out what the experts think about cryonics and come away without a clear answer. And part of the reason I signed up for cryonics in the first place is because it doesn't cost me much: the largest component is the life insurance for funding, only $50 / month.
So I've decided to put a bounty on being persuaded to cancel my cryonics subscription. If no one succeeds in convincing me, it costs me nothing, and if someone does succeed in convincing me the cost is less than the cost of being signed up for cryonics for a year. And yes, I'm aware that providing one-sided financial incentives like this requires me to take the fact that I've done this into account when evaluating anti-cryonics arguments, and apply extra scrutiny to them.
Note that there are several issues that ultimately go in to whether you should sign up for cryonics (the neuroscience / evaluation of current technology, estimate of the probability of a "good" future, various philosophical issues), I anticipate the greatest chance of being persuaded from scientific arguments. In particular, I find questions about personal identity and consciousness of uploads made from preserved brains confusing, but think there are very few people in the world, if any, who are likely to have much chance of getting me un-confused about those issues. The offer is blind to the exact nature of the arguments given, but I mostly foresee being persuaded by the neuroscience arguments.
And of course, I'm happy to listen to people tell me why the anti-cryonics arguments are wrong and I should stay signed up for cryonics. There's just no prize for doing so.