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gjm comments on I Will Pay $500 To Anyone Who Can Convince Me To Cancel My Cryonics Subscription - Less Wrong
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(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.
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.
I don't think that this is meant as a complete counter-argument against cryonics, but rather a point which needs to be considered when calculating the expected benefit of cryonics. For a very hypothetical example (which doesn't reflect my beliefs) where this sort of consideration makes a big difference:
Say I'm young and healthy, so that I can be 90% confident to still be alive in 40 years time and I also believe that immortality and reanimation will become available at roughly the same time. Then the expected benefit of signing up for cryonics, all else being equal, would be about 10 times lower if I expected the relevant technologies to go online either very soon (next 40 years) or very late (longer than I would expect cryonics companies to last) than if I expected them to go online some time after I very likely died but before cryonics companies disappeared.
Edit: Fixed silly typo.
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.
Except people do usually compare the spending on the insurance which takes low probability of need into account, to the benefits of cryonics that are calculated without taking the probability of need into account.
The issue is that it is not "cryonics or nothing". There's many possible actions. For example you can put money or time into better healthcare, to have a better chance of surviving until better brain preservation (at which point you may re-decide and sign up for it).
The probability of cryonics actually working is, frankly, negligible - you can not expect people to do something like this right without any testing, even if the general approach is right and it is workable in principle*. (Especially not in the alternative universe where people are crazy and you're one of the very few sane ones), and is easily out-weighted even by minor improvements in your general health. Go subscribe to a gym, for a young person offering $500 for changing his mind that'll probably blow cryonics out of water by orders of magnitude, cost benefit wise. Already subscribed to a gym? Work on other personal risks.
When immortality is at stake, a 91% chance is much much better than a 90% chance.
Not if that 1% (seems way over optimistic to me) is more expensive than other ways to gain 1% , such as by spending money or time on better health. Really, you guys are way over-awed by the multiplication of made up probabilities by made up benefits, forgetting that all you did was making an utterly lopsided, extremely biased pros and cons list, which is a far cry from actually finding the optimum action.
I signed up for cryonics precisely because I'm effectively out of lower cost options, and most of the other cryonicists are in a similar situation.
I wonder how good of an idea is a yearly full body MRI for early cancer detection...
There are those that argue that it's more likely to find something benign you've always had and wouldn't hurt you but you never knew about, seeing as we all have weird things in us, leading to unnecessary treatments which have risks.
What's about growing weird things?
Here we very often use ultrasound (and the ultrasound is done by the medical doctor rather than by a technician), it finds weird things very very well and the solution is simply to follow up later and see if its growing.
This can only decrease the amount of useful information you'd get from the MRI, though - it can't convert a benefit into a cost. After all, if the MRI doesn't show more than the expected amount of weirdness, you should avoid costly treatments.
ITYM “before”.