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thakil comments on We really need a "cryonics sales pitch" article. - Less Wrong
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Less than 1%. I haven't thought hard about these numbers, but I would say 1 has a probability of say 50/60%,2 10% (as 2 allows for societal collapse, not just company collapse) 3 10% (being quite generous there) and 4 40% which gives us 0.60.10.1*0.4=0.0024. If I'm more generous to 3, bumping it up to 80% I get 0.0192. I don't think I could be more generous to 2 though. These numbers are snatched from the air without deep thought, but I don't think they're wildly bad or anything.
thakil, I have a deal for you:
I offer you an extra .5% probability of your getting to spend a million years in utopia. How much are you willing to pay?
A fairly small amount. Again, risk aversion says to me that a 1 in 1000 chance isn't worth much if I can only make that bet once.
I don't think that "risk aversion" is the right phrase. Risk aversion arises when you would get a high marginal utility of wealth in future states in which you are relatively poor. As a result, you want to even out your wealth across different states so you buy insurance. Cryonics is like insurance in that it reduces the harm of bad states so all else being equal the more risk adverse you are, the more willing you should be to buy cryonics.
Risk aversion can be demonstrated even in trivial cases where you offer people a certain payout of $10 or a 50% chance of getting $20. I don't think it's about high marginal utility of wealth in certain future states.
Cryonics is not at all like insurance: insurance is about paying to protect yourself from a small chance that a bad thing will happen. Cryonics is about paying to get a small chance that a good thing will happen. It's much more akin to a lottery (as Vaniver already pointed out).
Risk aversion generally occur when your subjective utility with respect to some quantity X is monotonically but sublinearly increasing.
In most economic analysis X is generally considered to be money, but it can be really anything else, including years spent in utopia.
Explaining my position would be more appropriate for a full post rather than a response to a response to a response, so for now I will tap out on this issue.
I think this gets into prospect theory territory: psychologically, cryonics is perceived more like a lottery ticket than it is like insurance, in that you pay in the common case to gain wealth in the rare case. To the extent that one is sensitive to losses (rather than having a concave utility function), that makes cryonics seem like a worse idea (and insurance better).
Risk aversion generally occur when your subjective utility with respect to some quantity X is monotonically but sublinearly increasing.
In most economic analysis X is generally considered to be money, but it can be really anything else, including years spent in utopia.
Please demonstrate that your offer is credible :-P
See my book for why a singularity is likely near and the implications of this for cryonics.