Earlier is better — life insurance is cheaper when you are younger.
i haven’t thought about this carefully but my gut reaction given basic economics is to assign a low inside-view probability to this being true once you take into account that the counterfactual is to be investing the insurance premium money? this is at least if your claim is that earlier is non-trivially cheaper. there could be some effect that makes it a tiny bit cheaper i guess, though my guess is that it is a bit more expensive.
that said, i agree that if you should sign up for cryonics, then it is better to sign up now than in 10 years[1], but that’s because you get coverage for the the next 10 years this way, not because it’s cheaper.
(it could of course be true that it’s cheaper to sign up now for particular humans, like if you have the right sort of private information about your prospects, like that some evidence of having a terminal illness is just about to become visible to the insurer)
at least assuming you’re at some sort of fixed wealth level — being richer when older (as is realistic) could change this verdict I guess — and ignoring that you might have better information about AI stuff in 10 years, and potentially with some other qualifiers
This seemed to me to be the general consensus and I’ve had this pretty cached. From the top of my head, e.g., one reason why is that you’re somewhat likely to develop preexisting conditions if you sign up for insurance later, and while the expected amount of money is the same in an efficient and honest market, to the extent you care about log money, you don’t want to invest money now and sign up for life insurance later because that loses you log-money in expectation. (This is generally why you might want to ever pay for insurance.) Another reason is that insurers might want to have older people pay higher premiums because they expect more adversarial selection from older people (the older you are, the higher portion of people similar to you is signing up because they suspect that something’s wrong with them).
(This particular line is an artifact of a previous version that displayed a graph of EV depending on your sign-up age, and for positive EV, commented that it’s better to sign up now. It does not make much sense now.)
i haven’t thought about this carefully but my gut reaction given basic economics is to assign a low inside-view probability to this being true once you take into account that the counterfactual is to be investing the insurance premium money? this is at least if your claim is that earlier is non-trivially cheaper. there could be some effect that makes it a tiny bit cheaper i guess, though my guess is that it is a bit more expensive.
that said, i agree that if you should sign up for cryonics, then it is better to sign up now than in 10 years [1] , but that’s because you get coverage for the the next 10 years this way, not because it’s cheaper.
(it could of course be true that it’s cheaper to sign up now for particular humans, like if you have the right sort of private information about your prospects, like that some evidence of having a terminal illness is just about to become visible to the insurer)
at least assuming you’re at some sort of fixed wealth level — being richer when older (as is realistic) could change this verdict I guess — and ignoring that you might have better information about AI stuff in 10 years, and potentially with some other qualifiers
This seemed to me to be the general consensus and I’ve had this pretty cached. From the top of my head, e.g., one reason why is that you’re somewhat likely to develop preexisting conditions if you sign up for insurance later, and while the expected amount of money is the same in an efficient and honest market, to the extent you care about log money, you don’t want to invest money now and sign up for life insurance later because that loses you log-money in expectation. (This is generally why you might want to ever pay for insurance.) Another reason is that insurers might want to have older people pay higher premiums because they expect more adversarial selection from older people (the older you are, the higher portion of people similar to you is signing up because they suspect that something’s wrong with them).
The first is encompassed by “sign up now, but only because thet you get coverage now” (that is, insurance against big bad outcomes).
(This particular line is an artifact of a previous version that displayed a graph of EV depending on your sign-up age, and for positive EV, commented that it’s better to sign up now. It does not make much sense now.)