You’re ignoring the, currently, $200,000 expense that goes in to being preserved via Alcor. I dare say $200K is a vastly unreasonable bet to place if you’re assuming “probably no data worth saving”.
GiveWell currently rates the price of a single life at around $1,000. That’s 200 lives saved for the price of your cryonic preservation. Even assuming they’re off by an order of magnitude, that still leaves a 20:1 ratio.
I am not signed up for cryonics because I can’t afford it. So; point taken. But I would like to point out that:
1 It doesn’t have to be that expensive. $30′000 is quite expensive enough. (Presumably at lower odds of revival though)
2 You could use that same argument about everything: “What?? You bought a house for $200K? That’s 200 lives according to GiveWell!!” Yet people by houses anyway, and I don’t blame them.
There is a difference between “probably no data worth saving” and “a house.” Most people have fairly high confidence that the house will actually work...
Well, yes, but that’s a personal decision one has to make. My point is that it’s weird to point to anything I spends money on that you don’t and say “You could have spent it all on charity!”. Of course I could have. But I didn’t. I also spent a lot of money, most of it actually, on other stuff that I could have been without, like a car and a computer and a TV-set etc. If you spend a lot of money on charity and think others should too, then I salute you, but if so, then tell us that and what we should give to and why, but don’t tell us what we should not spend our own money on. Reminds me of this XKCD strip.
/rant
I’m sorry if I’m reacting to strongly, it’s just that I get that argument a lot on a lot of different subjects, and it’s like a fully general counterargument; it doesn’t help us decide what to spend money on except charity, and let’s be realistic: Only a very small portion of people spend non-negligible amounts on charity. If you bring out that argument on this topic, you should spread the blame equally over everything else ever bought that have comparable or smaller humanitarian value.
You’re ignoring the, currently, $200,000 expense that goes in to being preserved via Alcor. I dare say $200K is a vastly unreasonable bet to place if you’re assuming “probably no data worth saving”.
GiveWell currently rates the price of a single life at around $1,000. That’s 200 lives saved for the price of your cryonic preservation. Even assuming they’re off by an order of magnitude, that still leaves a 20:1 ratio.
I am not signed up for cryonics because I can’t afford it. So; point taken. But I would like to point out that:
1 It doesn’t have to be that expensive. $30′000 is quite expensive enough. (Presumably at lower odds of revival though)
2 You could use that same argument about everything: “What?? You bought a house for $200K? That’s 200 lives according to GiveWell!!” Yet people by houses anyway, and I don’t blame them.
There is a difference between “probably no data worth saving” and “a house.” Most people have fairly high confidence that the house will actually work...
Well, yes, but that’s a personal decision one has to make. My point is that it’s weird to point to anything I spends money on that you don’t and say “You could have spent it all on charity!”. Of course I could have. But I didn’t. I also spent a lot of money, most of it actually, on other stuff that I could have been without, like a car and a computer and a TV-set etc. If you spend a lot of money on charity and think others should too, then I salute you, but if so, then tell us that and what we should give to and why, but don’t tell us what we should not spend our own money on. Reminds me of this XKCD strip.
/rant
I’m sorry if I’m reacting to strongly, it’s just that I get that argument a lot on a lot of different subjects, and it’s like a fully general counterargument; it doesn’t help us decide what to spend money on except charity, and let’s be realistic: Only a very small portion of people spend non-negligible amounts on charity. If you bring out that argument on this topic, you should spread the blame equally over everything else ever bought that have comparable or smaller humanitarian value.