Expected utility doesn’t hold because you can use the money to give yourself more than a + 1 in a million chance of survival to the singularity, for example by buying 9000 lottery tickets and funding SIAI if you win.
That really depends a lot on the expected utility. Moreover, argument 2 above (getting people to think about long-term prospects) has little connection to the value of p.
Really? Even if you buy into Will’s estimate, there are at least three arguments that are not weak:
1) The expected utility argument (I presented above arguments for why this fails, but it isn’t completely clear that those rebuttals are valid)
2) One might think that buying into cryonics helps force people (including oneself) to think about the future in a way that produces positive utility.
3) One gets a positive utility from the hope that one might survive using cryonics.
Note that all three of these are fairly standard pro-cryonics arguments that all are valid even with the low probability estimate made by Will.
none of those hold for p = 1 in a million.
Expected utility doesn’t hold because you can use the money to give yourself more than a + 1 in a million chance of survival to the singularity, for example by buying 9000 lottery tickets and funding SIAI if you win.
1 in a million is really small.
That really depends a lot on the expected utility. Moreover, argument 2 above (getting people to think about long-term prospects) has little connection to the value of p.
The point about thinking more about the future with cryo is that you expect to be there.
p=1 in 1 million means you don’t expect to be there.
Even a small chance that you will be there helps put people in the mind-set to think long-term.