And a 5% chance of cryonics working seems hopelessly optimistic to me. So let's make that a 0.0000001% chance of working. Suddenly it seems like a pretty lousy deal. Do you think any rational person would still say yes?
No, they wouldn't. If that really is your estimated probability (where did you get those six zeros from? why not three, or twenty?), then you should not sign up for cryo. Those involved think there's a much higher chance than that. In fact, 5% is the usual order of magnitude.
And you won't have any other use for that money when you're dead. Whether it would be better to give it away and certainly die is a whole other issue. (EA meets cryonics — there's a subject for an interesting debate.)
So yes, those signing up are betting on a long shot, but not an impossibly long one.
What's your value for a micromort to you?
How much would someone have to bet you to chug 500ml of wine? 5 dollars? Lets go with 5 for now.
For an investment of 200K to be worth it it would have to be worth at least 40000 micromorts.
If I was certain that my method of death would preserve the brain and thus had the full million micromorts to play with then odds of 4% that the procedure would work would be just, just good enough to make it vaguely reasonable.
Also you perform a few actions every day that could see you dying in a manner that involves your ...
Every so often, I see a blog post about death, usually remarking on the death of someone the writer knew, and it often includes sentiments about "everyone is going to die, and that's terrible, but we can't do anything about it have so we have to accept it."
It's one of those sentiments that people find profound and is often considered Deep Wisdom. There's just one problem with it. It isn't true. If you think cryonics can work, as many people here do, then you believe that people don't really have to die, and we don't need to accept that we've only got at most about a hundred years and then that's it.
And I want to tell them this, as though I was a religious missionary out to spread the Good Word that you can save your soul and get into Christian Heaven as long as you sign up with Our Church. (Which I would actually do, if I believed that Christianity was correct.)
But it's not easy to broach the issue in a blog comment, and I'm not a good salesman. (One of the last times I tried, my posts kept getting deleted by the moderators.) It would be a lot better if I could simply link them to a better sales pitch; the kind of people I'm talking to are the kinds of people who read things on the Internet. Unfortunately, not one of the pro-cryonics posts listed on the LessWrong wiki can serve this purpose. Not "Normal Cryonics", not "You Only Live Twice", not "We Agree: Get Froze", not one! Why isn't there one? Heck, I'd pay money to get it written. I'd even pay Eliezer Yudkowsky a bunch of money to talk to my father on the telephone about cryonics, with a substantial bonus on offer if my father agrees to sign up. (We can discuss actual dollar amounts in the comments or over private messages.)
Please, someone get to work on this!