Does this criteria apply to present-day questions that are in vaguely the same ballpark? That is, do you choose who to help based on whether or not you can force them to pay you?
Good point here - I don't usually have any mechanism to force people to pay me. I usually to help based on how likely I think it I am to get what I want out of it. A few examples:
You seem to be assuming that immediate economic value is the only value worth considering; was this your intent?
I'm not sure what you mean by economic value. If you mean money, no. I think that humans value many things. I could certainly see a respected artist being revived even if the reviver could not directly tax the artist's production.
If I may ask, are you yourself a cryonicist who might end up facing the question from either side?
I'm not a cryonicist at this time. I do think there's a pretty good chance that either cryonics, brain uploading, or something similar will see some people from my lifetime recreated in a form after their deaths.
This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.
Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.
To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.