CarlShulman comments on I Will Pay $500 To Anyone Who Can Convince Me To Cancel My Cryonics Subscription - Less Wrong

33 Post author: ChrisHallquist 11 January 2014 10:39AM

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Comment author: NoSuchPlace 11 January 2014 11:43:46PM *  2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: CarlShulman 12 January 2014 01:31:53AM *  9 points [-]

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.

  • Life insurance, and cryonics membership fees, are paid on an annual basis
  • The price of life insurance is set largely based on your annual risk of death: if your risk of death is low (young, healthy, etc) then the cost of coverage will be low; if your risk of death is high the cost will be high
  • You can terminate both the life insurance and the cryonics membership whenever you choose, ending coverage
  • If you die in a year before 'immortality' becomes available, then it does not help you

So, in your scenario:

  • You have a 10% chance of dying before 40 years have passed
  • During the first 40 years you pay on the order of 10% of the cost of lifetime cryonics coverage (higher because there is some frontloading, e.g. membership fees not being scaled to mortality risk)
  • After 40 years 'immortality' becomes available, so you cancel your cryonics membership and insurance after only paying for life insurance priced for a 10% risk of death
  • In this world the potential benefits are cut by a factor of 10, but so are the costs (roughly); so the cost-benefit ratio does not change by a factor of 10
Comment author: NoSuchPlace 12 January 2014 02:31:19AM 7 points [-]

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.

Comment author: private_messaging 12 January 2014 10:56:55AM *  3 points [-]

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.

  • I'm assuming that cryonics proponents do agree that some level of damage - cryonics too late, for example - would result in information loss that likely can not be recovered even in principle.
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