point to Eliezer outright making things up on costs of cryonics
Citation needed. Please do. I pay those costs out of pocket, they can be verified with my insurance agent if need be, and I should very much like to know what on Earth you think you are talking about.
Eliezer reported what he (Eliezer) actually currently pays per year for term life insurance ($180) and his membership with the Cryonics Institute ($120). This is relevant for youngish people worried about the effect of cryonics on their near-term cash flow. Since he is buying term life insurance, when he renews it (probably after 20 years) he will have to pay higher premiums or have accumulated savings for the cost. The Cryonics Institute is also the cheapest service.
Taw said that this distracts from the total net present value of the stream of premium and membership costs, which has to be close to the net present value of just saving up to pay for the cryonics out of pocket (~$50,000 for CI in a distribution centered decades into the future) plus membership fees. Someone thinking about the tradeoff between cryonics and bequesting wealth to their kids or to charity would worry more about this number. Taw then says that Eliezer is “lying” for giving his current costs rather than this number.
However, that NPV is not the nominal amount of a payout decades into the future. A youngish person can get whole life insurance (where premiums do not increase with age). 24 year old User:AngryParsley pays $768 per year for a $200,000 payout life insurance policy. Over 50 years he will pay $38,400 in premiums, which will be invested by the insurance company (which expects to profit by winding up with more than $200,000 by the time of payout, on average).
There is an additional complicating factor when talking about cases decades into the future that doesn’t arise in Eliezer’s situation (youngish person wanting protection for the next few decades, with expectation of accumulating wealth over time), namely inflation in cryonics costs, but a policy such as AngryParsley’s leaves plenty of margin for that.
There is an additional complicating factor when talking about cases decades into the future...namely inflation in cryonics costs
What? Why expect this to happen? Wouldn’t cryonics groups plan for this? They do explicitly say how much money is required to be set aside via insurance for people to join, while that could change, why expect them to renege on their promises (contracts? I’m not too familiar) to preserve people for the previously set amount of money?
I wouldn’t trust a business that didn’t plan for changes in the cost of its raw material commodities to so much as make ice for a lemonade stand, much less freeze people. A claim like yours should have some clarification.
When I talked to Alcor, they said that they had raised the cost to join for new members several times, but had never increased the costs for existing members. They also said not to take that as a guarantee that they would never raise the costs for existing members, because they wouldn’t guarantee that.
Citation needed. Please do. I pay those costs out of pocket, they can be verified with my insurance agent if need be, and I should very much like to know what on Earth you think you are talking about.
I assume Taw is referring to this.
Eliezer reported what he (Eliezer) actually currently pays per year for term life insurance ($180) and his membership with the Cryonics Institute ($120). This is relevant for youngish people worried about the effect of cryonics on their near-term cash flow. Since he is buying term life insurance, when he renews it (probably after 20 years) he will have to pay higher premiums or have accumulated savings for the cost. The Cryonics Institute is also the cheapest service.
Taw said that this distracts from the total net present value of the stream of premium and membership costs, which has to be close to the net present value of just saving up to pay for the cryonics out of pocket (~$50,000 for CI in a distribution centered decades into the future) plus membership fees. Someone thinking about the tradeoff between cryonics and bequesting wealth to their kids or to charity would worry more about this number. Taw then says that Eliezer is “lying” for giving his current costs rather than this number.
However, that NPV is not the nominal amount of a payout decades into the future. A youngish person can get whole life insurance (where premiums do not increase with age). 24 year old User:AngryParsley pays $768 per year for a $200,000 payout life insurance policy. Over 50 years he will pay $38,400 in premiums, which will be invested by the insurance company (which expects to profit by winding up with more than $200,000 by the time of payout, on average).
There is an additional complicating factor when talking about cases decades into the future that doesn’t arise in Eliezer’s situation (youngish person wanting protection for the next few decades, with expectation of accumulating wealth over time), namely inflation in cryonics costs, but a policy such as AngryParsley’s leaves plenty of margin for that.
What? Why expect this to happen? Wouldn’t cryonics groups plan for this? They do explicitly say how much money is required to be set aside via insurance for people to join, while that could change, why expect them to renege on their promises (contracts? I’m not too familiar) to preserve people for the previously set amount of money?
I wouldn’t trust a business that didn’t plan for changes in the cost of its raw material commodities to so much as make ice for a lemonade stand, much less freeze people. A claim like yours should have some clarification.
When I talked to Alcor, they said that they had raised the cost to join for new members several times, but had never increased the costs for existing members. They also said not to take that as a guarantee that they would never raise the costs for existing members, because they wouldn’t guarantee that.