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Anyone remotely interested in cryonics should go read about it on LessWrong[1], instead of reading the same ol' ambivalent/pro-death comments. The only good rea

• dpark 15y ago
  >The only good reasons (that I can think of right now) not to sign up are if (1) you can't afford the ~$50/month or whatever your life insurance premiums + member dues would be, or (2) you rely on the financial support of people who are strongly anti-cryonics. Or you think it's dumb and fruitless and a waste of money. We don't have any way of predicting the expected value of cryopreservation. It could be that after you get frozen, an earthquake/tsunami takes out the power and you thaw. Or the company goes under. Or you get abandoned. Or any number of other things. How likely are you to be unfrozen/cured/revived? No one can say for sure, but it's probably pretty unlikely. On the other hand, what's the likelihood that your estate can do something useful with an extra $25k? That's pretty likely.
  • mmaro 15y ago
    That's a reasonable concern, but at this meta level there are two things going in cryonics' favor: there's a good chance you're overconfident about its non-utility[1], and there's a chance that your reanimation comes much earlier than expected, so the cumulative risks don't add up to much. And FWIW, Alcor and Cryonics Institute don't require power for storage; they require deliveries of liquid nitrogen. I don't think either facility has much earthquake/tsunami risk, either. [1] Personally, I would want to be > 99% sure about this before completely giving up on cryonics.
    • nknight 15y ago
      > Personally, I would want to be > 99% sure about this before completely giving up on cryonics. That same logic can be used to justify spending inordinate resources on any sort of snake oil. Why should cryonics be special?
      • jpulgarin 15y ago
        You don't know what logic he used, only his conclusion. Perhaps the logic is: * If something is agreed to have a chance of extending my life for thousands of years by more than 5% of people whose thinking I respect and * it costs less than 200k and * there are no obvious people who are profiting from this then * I want to be >99% sure about it not being viable before giving up on it.
        • nknight 15y ago
          He hasn't made that argument or anything close to it. The most he's said/implied is that $50/month is worth it. If he has some other logic, he'll need to share it if he hopes to convince anyone. Otherwise, he's just a guy standing on the sidewalk with a bottle of magic pills.
        • dpark 15y ago
          Since religion promises eternal life, and a large number of respected scientists are religious, I assume that you are Christian, right? Also Muslim? And maybe Jewish?
          • jpulgarin 15y ago
            What? I never said I used that logic.
            • dpark 15y ago
              Yeah, you did. If something is agreed to have a chance of extending my life for thousands of years by more than 5% of people whose thinking I respect and Check it costs less than 200k and Check there are no obvious people who are profiting from this then Check This is at least as true for religion (which you can practice for free) as it is for cryonics (which is a business venture). I want to be >99% sure about it not being viable before giving up on it. In what way can you be >99% sure that religion is not viable? What logic allows you to believe in cryonics but not religion, given that each have basically the same scientific underpinnings (which is to say, none at all). EDIT: Unless you meant that the logic you described was not yours, but just mmaro's, in which case fair enough.
  • jpulgarin 15y ago
    How can you say that cryonics working is "probably pretty unlikely" if "we have no way of predicting the expected value of cryopreservation". You can give probabilities to the events that would make cryonics fail and come up with an expected value.
    • karanbhangui 15y ago
      put that bootcamp logic to work bro!
    • burgerbrain 15y ago
      Not all unknowns are equally likely. Downvoter: I raise you a Russell's Teapot.
    • dpark 15y ago
      As the other commenter said, not all unknowns are equal. It's possible that Hitler was secretly frozen and will be the first person thawed in the event that we learn how. I doubt anyone can assign a true probability to that possibility, but most everyone would agree it's extremely unlikely. And no, you can't put a probability on those events which might make cryonics fail, because you don't know how long it will be before we discover a way to revive and restore those that have been frozen. It might happen tomorrow (likely not), or it might never happen. On a long enough timeline, the probability of failure approaches 1. You also can't really assign a probability that you will personally be unfrozen. Sure, you pay $50/mo to be maintained, but that's wholly different from the $100k it might cost to thaw you. There are so many ways cryonics could fail you, and really only one way they could succeed.
      • lsparrish 15y ago
        You don't pay $50/month after you die (that would be a unworkable business model for obvious reasons), rather the $100k or so goes mostly into a trust which pays for your maintenance (more like $100/year, could be far lower on a larger scale) after you are gone. Alcor's funding minimums are higher than CI's partly because they are expecting reanimation to be costly. They also pay ongoing costs mostly from member dues so far, so the patient care trust is just sitting there accumulating interest to be later used for reanimation. If you can get the probability of failure in any given year low enough, the half-life of the organization could be brought up to thousands of years. You can also set up back-up organizations that are obligated to take over if one of them fails. It's a matter of diversification.
  • thret 15y ago
    If there's a non-zero chance that you will be returned to life at some point in the future, then however unlikely that chance is worth 25k. It is a lottery; the cost is small compared to the payoff and it rationalises hope.
    • jpulgarin 15y ago
      I have discovered a way of extending anyone's life. I will extend yours if you send me 25k via paypal. You can find my email in my profile. Note that this is a non-zero chance.
      • lsparrish 15y ago
        There's an astronomically high probability that you're saying this to make a point, not because you have secret information. That fits perfectly with my model of expected human behavior. The question would be why your model of expected cryobiology/physics/future scientific development places its chance of success in anything like a similarly low category.
        • jpulgarin 15y ago
          I'm just arbitraging thret's belief that any non-zero chance of returning to life is worth 25k - nothing to do with cryonics.
      • thret 15y ago
        And if I had an infinite supply of funds I would take all chances, regardless of credibility. I do not. You do not get points for reductio ad absurdum arguments.
    • evgen 15y ago
      Sounds a lot like Pascal's wager; small cost, high benefit, equally ridiculous probability of a payoff...
      • burgerbrain 15y ago