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DanielLC comments on Years saved: Cryonics vs VillageReach - Less Wrong Discussion
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This completely ignores the fact that having one more person living at the time of the singularity helps just as much as having one more person frozen.
I'm not sure I follow. My post wasn't about the singularity, just a simple "years lived" calculation.
If I understand him correctly DanielLC is saying that the cost-effectiveness of donating to VillageReach is greater than that which your post suggests because in the event of a Singularity scenario it could have the effect of allowing 28 people to lead very very long lives rather than just 1 person.
This is an important consideration. However there's the opposite effect that more people in Africa means more competition for already scare food and resources, and more people living anywhere also means all the CO2 that they, their livestock, etc. generate, whereas a frozen person consumes only the electricity for keeping their LN2 cool. If you think the Singularity will take long enough to make lives lost from global warming an important consideration, this is an influence in the direction of cryonics. Whether its enough to balance out the chance of 28 very very long lives is harder to figure out; anyone whose life is saved from climate-related disaster is as likely to live to the Singularity as somone the same age saved by VillageReach.
Maybe we should start a charity that runs around vitrifying living people who have a large carbon footprint?
That's a clever idea, but it would create perverse incentives. Fortunately, the people with the largest carbon footprints (rich 1st worlders) are already the people with the greatest tendency to sign up for cryonics.
Alternately, you could find another charity to increase the population.
Like a religion whose central tenant is 'be fruitful and multiply'?
Ahhh, thank you! That makes sense, and is definitely an interesting consideration :)
That's exactly correct. But if you take post-singularity life into account, survivors from our time are competing for resources with new lives. If you fix the date of the singularity and trust post-singularity resources to be allocated optimally, our decisions don't have moral consequence beyond the singularity; we can't take credit for the 28k years either way.
But can you? Why not make the singularity earlier, or more likely? As for resources, the best way to do them is to make it early, so we can stop wasting sunlight.
Sure, you should try to affect the singularity. But the OP pretty explicitly takes this off the table by asking to compare just these two charities. The implicit assumption that these particular charities do not affect the singularity has been disputed before, but this takes us to a much more difficult calculation. (multifoleraterose argues both sides in the comments)
It may be difficult to tell how much they affect it, and even in which direction, but the idea that it will is pretty certain.
From what I can see, the only reason for doing something like VillageReach rather than preventing existential dangers or hastening the singularity is if you a) think we're doomed either way, or b) don't care about the future. For what it's worth, I'm (mostly) in group a.
This shifts the argument to estimates of the time frame of a technological singularity.