My argument against cyronics:
The probability of being successfully frozen and then being revived later on is dependent on the following
1)Being successfully frozen upon death (loved ones could interfere, lawyers could interfere, the manner of my death could interfere)
2)The company storing me keeps me in the same (or close to it) condition for however long it takes for revivification technologies to be discovered
3)The revivification technologies are capable of being discovered
4)There is a will to revivify me
These all combine to make the probability of success quite low.
The value of success is obviously high, but it's difficult to assess how high: just because they can revivify me doesn't mean my life will then end up being endless (at the very least, violent death might still lead to death in the future)
This is weighted by the costs. These are
1)The obvious financial ones
2)The social ones. I actually probably value this higher than 1. Explaining to my loved ones my decision, having to endure mockery and possibly quite strong reactions
The final point here is about risk aversion. While one could probably set up the utility calculation above to come up positive, I'm not sure that utility calculation is the correct way to determine whether to make such a risk. That is, if a probability of a one shot event is low enough, the expected value isn't a very useful indicator of my actual returns. That is, if a lottery has a positive gain, it still might not be worth me playing it if the odds are still very much against me making any money from it!
So how would you convince me?
1)Drop the costs, both social and financial. The former is obviously done by making cryonics more mainstream, the latter... well by making cryonics more mainstream, probably
2)Convince me that the probability of all 4 components is higher than I think it is. If the conjoined probability started hitting >5% then I might start thinking about it seriously.
(2) was a big deal for me as well, until I got used to it. Now cryonics has become a positive part of my identity that I'm proud to tell others about.
A friendly super-intelligence would easily solve (3) and (4). Keep in mind that most of the probability mass of cryonics working occurs if things turn out really well for the world. Conditional on cryonics working, you almost certainly would get an enormous benefit from greatly extending your life.
Every so often, I see a blog post about death, usually remarking on the death of someone the writer knew, and it often includes sentiments about "everyone is going to die, and that's terrible, but we can't do anything about it have so we have to accept it."
It's one of those sentiments that people find profound and is often considered Deep Wisdom. There's just one problem with it. It isn't true. If you think cryonics can work, as many people here do, then you believe that people don't really have to die, and we don't need to accept that we've only got at most about a hundred years and then that's it.
And I want to tell them this, as though I was a religious missionary out to spread the Good Word that you can save your soul and get into Christian Heaven as long as you sign up with Our Church. (Which I would actually do, if I believed that Christianity was correct.)
But it's not easy to broach the issue in a blog comment, and I'm not a good salesman. (One of the last times I tried, my posts kept getting deleted by the moderators.) It would be a lot better if I could simply link them to a better sales pitch; the kind of people I'm talking to are the kinds of people who read things on the Internet. Unfortunately, not one of the pro-cryonics posts listed on the LessWrong wiki can serve this purpose. Not "Normal Cryonics", not "You Only Live Twice", not "We Agree: Get Froze", not one! Why isn't there one? Heck, I'd pay money to get it written. I'd even pay Eliezer Yudkowsky a bunch of money to talk to my father on the telephone about cryonics, with a substantial bonus on offer if my father agrees to sign up. (We can discuss actual dollar amounts in the comments or over private messages.)
Please, someone get to work on this!