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shminux comments on Robin Hanson's Cryonics Hour - Less Wrong Discussion
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Having looked through the cryonics insurance options, I am having trouble justifying one vs a regular life insurance.
I think that an accident resulting in death makes cryo insurance a loss both to the insured and the estate, as the odds of both brain remaining intact and timely freezing are quite bad. So all you have left is the altruistic feeling of financing a cryo organization. If that's what you are after, donate explicitly.
If you get too demented or brain-damaged to handle your affairs, getting frozen is probably not a good idea anyway, since most of your personality is gone by then, and the odds of recovery are almost non-existent.
If you have a life insurance and get terminally ill, there are several ways to draw cash against the policy's value while you are still alive, and fund your cryosuspension that way.
If you want to guard against greedy relatives, (Rudi Hoffman's example), then drawing cash from your life insurance policy while still alive seems like a way to do it.
In summary, I am hard pressed to find a probable situation where a cryo insurance is preferable to a general whole life or universal life insurance, unless you have no one but yourself to care about. What am I missing here?
After the failure of the Cryonics Society of New York (CSNY, not to be confused with this or this), due in part to their acceptance of cases whose families promised to pay in installments but later reneged (causing them to run out of money for keeping their other patients cryopreserved), the remaining cryonics organizations require ironclad assurance of payment for suspension. That's really hard to arrange if you die without a few months' notice, even if you have an insurance policy, since your beneficiaries won't have the money to give to the organization for a few weeks or months after your death (for which time you'd be on dry ice, and undergoing a small but worrisome amount of degradation). Naming the organization as a beneficiary gives them 100% assurance that the suspension will be paid for, and without that they won't send out the suspension team.
(Someone correct me if I'm mistaken in this account.)
Cryonics insurance is regular life insurance. What makes it cryonics insurance is that the beneficiary is a cryonics organization. You can give instructions to your cryonics organization about what to do with excess funds (the entire amount if you are not preserved, you can also give instructions about under which conditions you should be preserved).
Right, but my question is, why bother?
Think about who benefits from such a precommitment.
(Doesn't imply it's a scam, it's allowed to provide valuable services and to try to maximize income at the same time.)