ChrisHallquist 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: V_V 11 January 2014 04:22:17PM *  29 points [-]

Cryonics success is an highly conjunctive event, depending on a number of different, roughly independent, events to happen.

Consider this list:

  • The cryorpreservation process as performed by current cryo companies, when executed perfectly, preserves enough information to reconstruct your personal identity. Neurobiologists and cryobiologists generally believe this is improbable, for the reasons explained in the links you cited.
  • 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 defraud you.

  • Assuming that the process has actually preserved the relevant information, technology for recover it and revive you in some way must be developed. Guessing about future technology is difficult. Historically, predicted technological advances that seemed quite obvious at some point (AGI, nuclear fusion power, space colonization, or even flying cars and jetpacks) failed to materialize, while actual technological improvements were often not widely predicted many years in advance (personal computers, cellphones, the Internet, etc.). The probability that technology many years from now goes along a trajectory we can predict is low.

  • Assuming that the tech is eventually developed, it must be sufficiently cheap, and future people must have an incentive to use it to revive you. It's unclear what such an incentive could be. Revival of a few people for scientific purposes, even at a considerable cost, seems plausible, but mass revival of >thousands frozen primitives?

  • Your cryocompany must not suffer financial failure, or some other significant local disruption, before the tech becomes available and economically affordable. Very few organizations survive more than one century, and those which do, often radically alter their mission. Even worse, it is plausible that before revival tech becomes available, radical life extension becomes available, and therefore people stop signing up for cryonics. Cryocompanies might be required to go on for many decades or centuries without new customers. It's unclear that they could remain financially viable and motivated in this condition. The further in the future revival tech becomes available, the lower the chances that your cryocompany will still exist.

  • Regional or planetary disasters, either natural (earthquake, flood, hurricane, volcanic eruption, asteroid strike, etc.) or human-made (war, economic crisis, demographic crisis due to environmental collapse, etc.) must not disrupt your preservation. Some of these disaster are exceptional, other hit with a certain regularity over the course of a few centuries. Again, the further in the future revival tech becomes available, the lower the chances that a disaster will destroy your frozen remains before.

You can play with assigning probabilities to these events and multiplying them. I don't recommend trusting too much any such estimate due to the fact that it is easy to fool yourself into a sense of false precision while picking numbers that suit whatever you already wanted to believe.
But the takeaway point is that in order to cryonics to succeed, many things have to happen or be true in succession, and the failure of only one of them would make cryonics ultimately fail at reviving you. Therefore, I think, cryonics success is so improbable that it is not worth the cost.

Comment author: ChrisHallquist 13 January 2014 02:46:31AM *  1 point [-]

Most of these issues I was already aware of, though I did have a brief "holy crap" moment when I read this parenthetical statement:

such as keeping certain cryopatients on dry ice for two weeks

But following the links to the explanation, I don't think this impacts considerably my estimate of CI's competence / trustworthiness. This specific issue only affects people who didn't sign up for cryonics in advance, comes with an understandable (if not correct) rationale, and comes with acknowledgement that it's less likely to work than the approach they use for people who were signed up for cryonics before their deaths.

Their position may not be entirely rational, but I didn't previously have any illusions about cryonics organizations being entirely rational (it seems to me cryonics literature has too much emphasis on the possibility of reviving the original meat as opposed to uploading.)

Comment author: V_V 13 January 2014 04:10:06PM *  1 point [-]

But following the links to the explanation, I don't think this impacts considerably my estimate of CI's competence / trustworthiness. This specific issue only affects people who didn't sign up for cryonics in advance, comes with an understandable (if not correct) rationale, and comes with acknowledgement that it's less likely to work than the approach they use for people who were signed up for cryonics before their deaths.

"less likely to work" seems a bit of an euphemism. I think that the chances that this works are essentially negligible even if cryopreservation under best condition did work (which is already unlikely).

My point is that even if they don't apply this procedure to all their patients, the fact that CI are offering it means that they are either interested in maximizing profit instead of success probability, and/or they don't know what they are doing, which is consistent with some claims by Mike Darwin (who, however, might have had an axe to grind).

Signing up for cryonics is always buying a pig in a poke because you have no way of directly evaluating the quality of the provider work within your lifetime, therefore the reputation of the provider is paramount. If the provider behaves in a way which is consistent with greed or incompetence, it is an extremely bad sign.

Comment author: ChrisHallquist 13 January 2014 09:17:37PM 2 points [-]

Read a bit of Mike Darwin's complaints, those look more serious. I will have to look into that further. Can you give me a better sense of your true (not just lower bound) estimate of the chances there's something wrong with cryonics orgs on an institutional level that would lead to inadequate preservation even if in theory they had a working procedure in theory?

Comment author: V_V 13 January 2014 10:27:15PM 0 points [-]

I'm not sure how to condense my informal intuition into a single number. I would say > 0.5 and < 0.9, closer to the upper bound (and even closer for the Cryonics Institute than for Alcor).