- The money it would take to sign up for cryonics, though not large, is enough to buy several centuries of healthy life each year if given to givewell's top malaria charities.
I don't see the point of extending the lives of people in chronically dysfunctional societies which can't solve their own malaria problems. For one thing, the boys who survive could just wind up as soldiers for the local warlord and make other people's lives less desirable as as consequence. For example, they might wind up raping the young women who survive.
- There is a chance we'll discover immortality in my lifetime.
Sorry, this shows seriously confused thinking. You can't test the effectiveness of "life extension," "anti-aging" and "immortality" treatments on humans any faster than the rate at which humans happen to live. We can conduct experiments to create mice which arguably live the muscine equivalent of 1,000 human years. But we know the results of these experiments because the experimental populations have already died with recorded birth and death dates for each individual mouse. But we can't extrapolate this to humans because you can't tell if someone can live 1,000 years until someone lives 1,000 years, which means we will won't have that knowledge any faster than it can arrive.
I am not currently signed up for cryonics. I am considering it, but have not yet decided whether it is the right choice. Here's my reasoning.
I am very sure of the following:
1. Life is better than death. For any given finite lifespan, I'd prefer a longer one, at least within the bounds of numbers I can reasonably contemplate.
2. Signing up for cyronics increases the expected value of my lifespan.
But then I also believe the following:
3. I am not particularly exceptional among the set of human beings, and so should not value my lifespan much more than that of other humans. I obviously fail at this in practice, but I think the world would be a much better place if I and others didn't fail so often.
4. The money it would take to sign up for cryonics, though not large, is enough to buy several centuries of healthy life each year if given to givewell's top malaria charities. Since on average I expect to live another 50-60 years without cryonics, the investment would need to increase the expected value of my lifespan by at least 5,000 years at minimum to be morally acceptable to me.
5. There is a chance we'll discover immortality in my lifetime. If so, then if I signed up for cryonics the payout is 0, and the people who died because I bought insurance instead of charity are people I could have saved for far longer.
So, what do you think is the probability that immortality will be discovered in my lifetime? What about the probability that, if signed up for cryonics, I will live into the far future? These priors would seem to be the key for me to decide whether signing up for cryonics is morally acceptable to me.