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advancedatheist comments on We really need a "cryonics sales pitch" article. - Less Wrong Discussion
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What's your value for a micromort to you?
How much would someone have to bet you to chug 500ml of wine? 5 dollars? Lets go with 5 for now.
For an investment of 200K to be worth it it would have to be worth at least 40000 micromorts.
If I was certain that my method of death would preserve the brain and thus had the full million micromorts to play with then odds of 4% that the procedure would work would be just, just good enough to make it vaguely reasonable.
Also you perform a few actions every day that could see you dying in a manner that involves your brain being destroyed or damaged too significantly for cryonics to help much.
We're not starting from the full million, accident, fire, bodyloss, alzheimer's, too-slow freezing, people ignoring the advanced directive about what's to be done with your head etc eats up a big chunk of the probability space.
Lets say there's a 50/50 chance, now it needs a procedure that's 8% successful to be reasonable. Optimistic people like to say around 5%, I wouldn't be surprised if it's bellow 1% or even 0.1% or if it could turn out once they figure out how to actually do it that most current freezing methods are unsuitable and lead to a husk vaguely like you with most of it's memories mangled.
People value their lives but most don't value their lives above everything else in the universe and would prefer to give their grandkids a college fund rather than taking a long shot at immortality.
This is really an argument to have with those who advocate signing up. But as it's directed to me, I'll point out one factor that needs to be included in that calculation.
What's the size of a micromort?
A millionth of an ordinary lifetime, or a millionth of the lifetime one might have if cryonics pays off? Given commensurate advances in medicine generally, if you get revived, you might expect a much longer lifespan.
BTW, it would take a lot more than $5 to persuade me to drink a gratuitous half litre of wine. For me, that amount would be close to throwing up in the street and having the following morning wiped out recovering from the hangover. I've done that a few times in the past, but only enough to know better.
Some do prefer that, some sign up for cryo, some can afford both, some neither, and some do completely different things with their resources. People are different and there's no need for everyone to do the same thing.
For that we'd have to get into QALY's which is tough since we can't make any kind of reasonable estimates for how many QALY's someone would gain (perhaps future government decides to deal with a population crisis by setting maximum year limits).
Micromorts aren't perfect but do make it possible to compare because 1 micromort suffered today can be used to judge cash value something is worth. If you'd accept a minimum of $10,000 to perform a 100 micromort task today(making you quite a bit more cautious than average) that still reduces your chances of immortality even if you're signed up for cryonics which allows you to do some kind of cost/reward tradeoff calculations.