I'm trying to find out how short-term or long-term your thinking is. Moving to Mars seems very fragile, depending on constant input from planet earth. The challenges of moving to another star system where you could have a self-sustaining life are immense. Neither option is available in your lifetime. I think quantitative estimates of the survival of sapience on earth are pretty much useless -- the uncertainties of individual estimates are way too high. As a young man in 1981 I debated moving from the US to Australia as a hedge against nuclear war, a much more modest proposition. I decided not to, partly because I could be a more effective activist against nuclear war in a superpower that was my native culture. So if you go down this path, you could think of your utility in terms of preventing the destruction of sapience on earth.

Or maybe the frozen people won't have let their opinions slip as the winds shifted. They'll see the theocratic takeover as a fait accompli, won't be on the record as opposing it, and so will be able to declare their allegiance to the Great Ju Ju and avoid torture altogether.

Or maybe, being from the past will confer a special honor and status with the Great Ju Ju, so that it will be extra wonderful to be a thawed human popsicle.

We can play outlandish maybes til the cows come home. Averaging over my probabilities for all hypothetical futures, I'd rather be alive than not 500 years from now.

Too many arguments in the world of the form "but what if Horrible Scenario occurs?" If Horrible Scenario occurs, I'll be fucked. That's the answer. Can't deny it. But unless you have information to share that significantly increases my probabilities for Horrible Scenarios, merely identifying bad things that could happen is neither a productive nor a fun game.

Immortality is still possible. [...] You can still have hope, but it doesn't rest on spending large sums on freezing your brain.

How does this follow? Even your most powerful argument/worst-case scenario has immortality as its outcome, just not completely on your own terms. To what extent are we not "[serving] the ends of the elite" and "prevented from taking [our] own life if [we] found it miserable" even now?

When I started this thread, I wasn't quite sure where it was going to end up. But here's what I see as the most powerful argument:

An enlightened, benign future society might revive you to let you live life to your full potential, for your sake -- when it is convenient for them. But a future society that has morality in line with some pretty good present ones (not the very best) might see you as a precious commodity to revive for the ends of the elite. An enlightened society would not revive you if you were going to be miserable with serious brain damage, but a less enlightened society would have few qualms about that. Even if revived intact, you would still serve the ends of the elite and might well be prevented from taking your own life if you found it miserable.

I judge the latter scenario much more likely than the former. If so, cryonic preservation's appeal would be much less -- it might even be something you would pay to get out of!

You who are cryonics enthusiasts who are also committed to the LW method should think about this. Maybe you will judge the probabilities of the future scenarios differently, but there are strong cognitive biases at work here against an accurate analysis.

Immortality is still possible. We might be subjects in an experiment, and when we croak our brains might be uploaded by the compassionate experimenters. Maybe the theists are right (there sure are a lot of them) and maybe the ones are right who preach universal salvation. You can still have hope, but it doesn't rest on spending large sums on freezing your brain.

But are they less probable than the positive high-payoff scenarios (in just, happy societies that value freedom, comfort, and the pursuit of knowledge)? Evidence? Are you keeping in mind optimism bias?

Adele_L in a comment in this thread:

based on the general trend that societies with higher levels of technology tend to be better ones to live in

If there is a big enough change in the species, I can see you being revived for experimental purposes.

If a theocratic state wanted to torture the infidels, I don't see how being a human popsicle is going to make the situation any worse.

But that the dread of something after death,— The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn No traveller returns,—puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of?

Interesting. The referenced discussions often assume the post-singularity AI (which for the record I think very unlikely). The development of that technology is likely to be, if not exactly independent, only loosely correlated with the technology for cryonic revival, isn't it?

Certainly you have to allow for the possibility of cryonic revival without the post-singularity AI, and I think we can make better guesses about the possible configurations of those worlds than post-AI worlds.

I see the basic pro-cryonics argument as having the form of Pascal's wager. Although the probability of success might be on the low side (for the record, I think it is very low), the potential benefits are so great that it is worth it. The cost is paid in mere money. But is it?

In my main post I used the "torture by theocracy" example as an extreme, but I think there are many other cases to worry about.

Suppose that among a population of billions, there are a few hundred people who can be revived. The sort of society we all hope for might just revive them so they can go on to achieve their inherent potential as they see fit. But in societies that are just a bit more broken than our own, those with the power to cause revival may have self-interest very much in mind. You can imagine that the autonomy of those who are revived would be seriously constrained, and this by itself could make a post-revival life far from what people hope. The suicide option might be closed off to them entirely; if they came to regret their continued existence they might well be unable to end it.

Perhaps the resurrected will have to deal with the strange and upsetting limitations that today's brain damage patients face. Perhaps future society will be unable to find a way for revived people to overcome such problems, and yet keep them alive for hundreds of years -- they are just too valuable as experimental subjects.

Brain damage aside, what value will they have in a future society? They will have had unique and direct knowledge of life in a bygone century, including its speech patterns and thought patterns. I think modern historians would be ecstatic at the prospect of being able to observe or interview pockets of people from various epochs in history, including ancient ones (ethical considerations aside).

Perhaps they will be valued as scientific subjects and carefully insulated from any contaminating knowledge of the future world as it has developed. That might be profoundly boring and frustrating.

Perhaps the revived will be confined in "living museums" where they face a thousand years re-enacting what life was like in 21st century America -- perhaps subject to coercion to do it in a way that pleases the masters.

If the revived people are set free, what then? Older people in every age typically shake their heads in dismay at changes in the world; this effect magnified manyfold might be profoundly unsettling -- downright depressing, in fact.

One can reasonably object that all of these are all low-probability. But are they less probable than the positive high-payoff scenarios (in just, happy societies that value freedom, comfort, and the pursuit of knowledge)? Evidence? Are you keeping in mind optimism bias?

In deciding in favor of cryonic preservation, I don't think the decision can be near costs traded off against scenarios of far happiness. There's far misery to consider as well.