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.
There continue to be ridiculously cheap lives to be saved over the course of one's lifetime,
Cryonics does not itself become ridiculously cheap when practiced on a larger scale,
One values lives in a person-neutral way while in a mode of thinking that is not too far-biased to spur significant action,
Cryonics does not increase your total budget for far purchases (e.g. reduced willpower-depletion from resisting luxuries),
The argument for contributing to (or promoting) efficient charity such as GiveWell instead of Cryonics makes sense to me.
However, I don't think any of the above are all that likely. Here are my counterarguments:
If GiveWell is given more attention and promoted more effectively, human lives will eventually become less ridiculously cheap to save. It's a simple matter of redirecting money that would otherwise go to less efficient charities. The requirement for this is more advertising/exposure. For the median smart person who spends significant time online and does not have a lot of money, time contributions towards advertising GiveWell and how ridiculously cheap it is to save a life that way may be more effective than equivalent cash contributions (given how relatively little-known it is).
If more people purchase cryonics, cryonics will become less expensive. The chance of cryonics working will also go up because it will be practiced in a higher grade clinical setting (which carries its own costs, but these come out of the normal cost of dying in the first world).
Part of the discomfort that cryonics causes (and one reason I think it is popular on lesswrong) is that it forces you to decompartmentalize between near and far. This is an important rationality skill. Developing it could easily trigger a higher tendency to take action on far issues like donating to GiveWell (or, generally, choosing an efficient charity like GiveWell over a more "fuzzy-optimized" charity).
Cryonics tends to feel like a very selfish choice. Thus money spent on cryonics feels like money spent on a luxury cruise, despite its potential positive externalities (such as making cryonics better/cheaper for everyone else). The part of the brain that insists that so many dollars must go towards selfish things is probably being sated by cryonics costs, leaving more room in the budget for charitable donations when all is said and done (assuming one does not develop the habit of rationalizing selfishness from the exercise).
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.