I think cryonics advocates should consider this, not as a rhetorical question about society, but as a strategy for themselves.
Consider the history of vaccination. Like cryonics (for the moment I assume that cryonics works, though I personally am not sure about that) vaccination was a new technology that helped people live longer but met with popular resistance. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, after almost dying from smallpox, had her son inoculated in the Turkish method and wrote many letters to her friends in England, promoting and explaining the practice, and had many of her relatives inoculated. That’s the stage cryonics is in today. A few individuals—generally open to the idea because they’re particularly well-educated and often because they’ve been touched by tragedy—try to promote the practice by getting it done to themselves and perhaps also to relatives.
After Edward Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine, though, the landscape changed. He got grants from Parliament to continue his work, and founded a charitable organization—the Jennerian Institution—to promote vaccination. In other words, he made it a public health issue. Vaccination was no longer something that a rich, eccentric lady might buy for herself, but something respected scientists under the auspices of the government would offer to all. I think that making vaccination charitable made it respectable.
It is hard to appeal to someone’s idealism by asking him to buy himself a useful item. Cryonics, as yet, is solitary and individual, not communal and charitable. A few people, like Mary Montagu, for some reason really do want this life-extending procedure for themselves and their relatives. But if they ever want it to catch on more broadly, they should set up their institutions so that they’re mostly giving it away rather than consuming it. The public will sympathize better with someone trying to save lives than with someone trying to save her own life.
But if they ever want it to catch on more broadly, they should set up their institutions so that they’re mostly giving it away rather than consuming it. The public will sympathize better with someone trying to save lives than with someone trying to save her own life.
I support that. I posted (or was going to post? Can’t remember if I did) a comment to that effect on one of Hanson’s recent posts on cryonics, suggesting a charity offering cryonics to people with terminal illnesses, perhaps children especially. Something like the Make-A-Wish Foundation when the wish is to live. That would rate highly on both fuzzies and utility — indeed, when it comes to cryonics, the two are pretty intertwined for the time being, because the high level of antifuzzies currently associated with it prevents it from having the humanitarian impact it otherwise could. Reframing it as a lifesaving medical procedure that will give dying children a chance to live to see the future could do a lot toward making it seem like an acceptable, obvious decision.
Cryonics actually works (probably), and is cheap (definitely). SENS, on the other hand, is speculative, and needs $ hundreds of millions at the minimum to get to work.
I’d say that the marginal utility of money for the first $100M would be better spent almost entirely on marketing cryo.
After that, then maybe some exploratory work on SENS… though it would be an uphill battle against both a fiendishly hard scientific problem, AND public opinion. Cryo, on the other hand, you just have to sell it. (And that might be relatively easy, i.e. 1 million signups for $100M in promotional work)
On the other hand though, I think that if SENS actually worked, it would make a lot more of a difference to the world than if we successfully marketed cryo to a million nerdy-types.
So actually, maybe SENS is the better investment, if you have big money and you’re an altruist.
With smaller money and more egoism/desire to save those who are more like you, cryo-marketing.
SENS, on the other hand, is speculative, and needs $ hundreds of millions at the minimum to get to work.
If you’re talking about the cost of R&D, I don’t think so. A lot of the work of SENS is just to find the important developments amid the mass of biological research happening every day in thousands of universities and companies. Certainly, once you grasp that big picture, you can spot gaps and call for them to be filled with specific new research, and that costs money. But I see SENS as mostly an exercise in providing a coherent strategic vision for rejuvenation research (and that’s a vision that needs constant updating).
But what do you do once you find the important developments? You have to either fund it yourself, or somehow convince a skeptical and chaotic community to do lots more of it! And that costs money. Just because you know the answer… … doesn’t mean that you can just tell it to people and expect them to obey.
I would really like an answer to this question because it is the predicament that I am quite sure I find myself in. I can’t get people to pay enough attention to even tell me where I am wrong. :(
“Why not buy cryonics for others?”
I think cryonics advocates should consider this, not as a rhetorical question about society, but as a strategy for themselves.
Consider the history of vaccination. Like cryonics (for the moment I assume that cryonics works, though I personally am not sure about that) vaccination was a new technology that helped people live longer but met with popular resistance. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, after almost dying from smallpox, had her son inoculated in the Turkish method and wrote many letters to her friends in England, promoting and explaining the practice, and had many of her relatives inoculated. That’s the stage cryonics is in today. A few individuals—generally open to the idea because they’re particularly well-educated and often because they’ve been touched by tragedy—try to promote the practice by getting it done to themselves and perhaps also to relatives.
After Edward Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine, though, the landscape changed. He got grants from Parliament to continue his work, and founded a charitable organization—the Jennerian Institution—to promote vaccination. In other words, he made it a public health issue. Vaccination was no longer something that a rich, eccentric lady might buy for herself, but something respected scientists under the auspices of the government would offer to all. I think that making vaccination charitable made it respectable.
It is hard to appeal to someone’s idealism by asking him to buy himself a useful item. Cryonics, as yet, is solitary and individual, not communal and charitable. A few people, like Mary Montagu, for some reason really do want this life-extending procedure for themselves and their relatives. But if they ever want it to catch on more broadly, they should set up their institutions so that they’re mostly giving it away rather than consuming it. The public will sympathize better with someone trying to save lives than with someone trying to save her own life.
I support that. I posted (or was going to post? Can’t remember if I did) a comment to that effect on one of Hanson’s recent posts on cryonics, suggesting a charity offering cryonics to people with terminal illnesses, perhaps children especially. Something like the Make-A-Wish Foundation when the wish is to live. That would rate highly on both fuzzies and utility — indeed, when it comes to cryonics, the two are pretty intertwined for the time being, because the high level of antifuzzies currently associated with it prevents it from having the humanitarian impact it otherwise could. Reframing it as a lifesaving medical procedure that will give dying children a chance to live to see the future could do a lot toward making it seem like an acceptable, obvious decision.
I strongly agree.
How would the effectiveness of cryonics as charity compare to supporting SENS?
Cryonics actually works (probably), and is cheap (definitely). SENS, on the other hand, is speculative, and needs $ hundreds of millions at the minimum to get to work.
I’d say that the marginal utility of money for the first $100M would be better spent almost entirely on marketing cryo.
After that, then maybe some exploratory work on SENS… though it would be an uphill battle against both a fiendishly hard scientific problem, AND public opinion. Cryo, on the other hand, you just have to sell it. (And that might be relatively easy, i.e. 1 million signups for $100M in promotional work)
On the other hand though, I think that if SENS actually worked, it would make a lot more of a difference to the world than if we successfully marketed cryo to a million nerdy-types.
So actually, maybe SENS is the better investment, if you have big money and you’re an altruist.
With smaller money and more egoism/desire to save those who are more like you, cryo-marketing.
If you’re talking about the cost of R&D, I don’t think so. A lot of the work of SENS is just to find the important developments amid the mass of biological research happening every day in thousands of universities and companies. Certainly, once you grasp that big picture, you can spot gaps and call for them to be filled with specific new research, and that costs money. But I see SENS as mostly an exercise in providing a coherent strategic vision for rejuvenation research (and that’s a vision that needs constant updating).
But what do you do once you find the important developments? You have to either fund it yourself, or somehow convince a skeptical and chaotic community to do lots more of it! And that costs money. Just because you know the answer… … doesn’t mean that you can just tell it to people and expect them to obey.
I would really like an answer to this question because it is the predicament that I am quite sure I find myself in. I can’t get people to pay enough attention to even tell me where I am wrong. :(