There’s a possibly-important probability missing from your analysis.
For it to be worth paying for cryonics, it has to (1) work and (2) not be redundant. That is: revival and repair has to become feasible and not too expensive before your cryonics company goes bust, disappears in a collapse of civilization, etc. -- but if that happens within your lifetime then you needn’t have bothered with cryonics in the first place.
So the success condition is: huge technical advances, quite soon, but not too soon.
Whether this matters depends on (a) whether it’s likely that if revival and repair become viable at all they’ll do so in the next few decades, and (b) whether, in that scenario, the outcome is so glorious that you simply won’t care that you poured a pile of money into cryonics that you could have spent on books, or sex&drugs&rock&roll, or whatever.
The cost of life insurance scales with your risk of death in the covered period: if cryonics is rendered redundant then you can stop paying for the life insurance (and any cryonics membership dues) thereafter.
Redundancy would be a significant worry if, counterfactually, you had to pay a non-refundable lump sum in advance.
Future civilizations have the power and motivation to restore even people who were simply buried
Everything you ever coherently wanted to get out of cryopreservation can be achieved by a cheaper method, e.g. having children
I don’t think the first point has significant probability, but I’ll throw it out there in case it inspires someone to find more possibilities I’ve overlooked.
If the alternative is between saving for retirement and cryonics then for a lot of probability mass of cryonics being redundant nanotech or time travel has made us extremely rich perhaps reducing the cost to us of having not saved (although interest rates might have been high, still you can check for this along the way). For much of the probability mass of cryonics not working, our species has gone extinct (and not in a good way) eliminating the value of money and the harm of not having saved as much as you would have had you not done cryonics.
If the alternative is between saving for retirement and cryonics
In my case (and I think for a significant number of others on lw) the alternative is donating more to effective charities. When your money might be going to helping people now or reducing existential risk we have a real tradeoff.
I agree that the first part of that may well be true—it was (b) in my last paragraph—but I’m not so convinced by the first bit. My own evaluation is that most of the probability mass of “cryonics fails for me” involves things going wrong after the end of my life, and while I would indeed very much prefer our species not to go extinct soon after my death, knowing that it will wouldn’t stop me caring how comfortable my retirement is, or even caring how much money I’m able to leave to others when I die.
Actually, I’m skeptical of this sort of argument whichever way it goes; my (b) was more a concession to those who think differently than anything else. My preference for the next (say) 20-50 years of my life to be more comfortable isn’t materially altered if what follows is going to be infinite blissful heaven, or if it’s going to be infinite tormented hell. (Whether the heaven/hell in question are technological or religious or whatever else.) So if cryonics is unnecessary because we all win anyway, I would rather not spend any money preparing for it.
There’s a possibly-important probability missing from your analysis.
For it to be worth paying for cryonics, it has to (1) work and (2) not be redundant. That is: revival and repair has to become feasible and not too expensive before your cryonics company goes bust, disappears in a collapse of civilization, etc. -- but if that happens within your lifetime then you needn’t have bothered with cryonics in the first place.
So the success condition is: huge technical advances, quite soon, but not too soon.
Whether this matters depends on (a) whether it’s likely that if revival and repair become viable at all they’ll do so in the next few decades, and (b) whether, in that scenario, the outcome is so glorious that you simply won’t care that you poured a pile of money into cryonics that you could have spent on books, or sex&drugs&rock&roll, or whatever.
The cost of life insurance scales with your risk of death in the covered period: if cryonics is rendered redundant then you can stop paying for the life insurance (and any cryonics membership dues) thereafter.
Redundancy would be a significant worry if, counterfactually, you had to pay a non-refundable lump sum in advance.
Two other potential forms of redundancy:
Future civilizations have the power and motivation to restore even people who were simply buried
Everything you ever coherently wanted to get out of cryopreservation can be achieved by a cheaper method, e.g. having children
I don’t think the first point has significant probability, but I’ll throw it out there in case it inspires someone to find more possibilities I’ve overlooked.
If the alternative is between saving for retirement and cryonics then for a lot of probability mass of cryonics being redundant nanotech or time travel has made us extremely rich perhaps reducing the cost to us of having not saved (although interest rates might have been high, still you can check for this along the way). For much of the probability mass of cryonics not working, our species has gone extinct (and not in a good way) eliminating the value of money and the harm of not having saved as much as you would have had you not done cryonics.
I’m an Alcor member.
In my case (and I think for a significant number of others on lw) the alternative is donating more to effective charities. When your money might be going to helping people now or reducing existential risk we have a real tradeoff.
So your savings for retirement is < the cost of cryonics? I doubt this is true for many lw >30 years old.
I agree that the first part of that may well be true—it was (b) in my last paragraph—but I’m not so convinced by the first bit. My own evaluation is that most of the probability mass of “cryonics fails for me” involves things going wrong after the end of my life, and while I would indeed very much prefer our species not to go extinct soon after my death, knowing that it will wouldn’t stop me caring how comfortable my retirement is, or even caring how much money I’m able to leave to others when I die.
Actually, I’m skeptical of this sort of argument whichever way it goes; my (b) was more a concession to those who think differently than anything else. My preference for the next (say) 20-50 years of my life to be more comfortable isn’t materially altered if what follows is going to be infinite blissful heaven, or if it’s going to be infinite tormented hell. (Whether the heaven/hell in question are technological or religious or whatever else.) So if cryonics is unnecessary because we all win anyway, I would rather not spend any money preparing for it.
Assume that one of the following is true:
1) Cryonics will help you.
2) Cryonics will not help you. Money you save today will not make you happier in the future.
3) Cryonics will not help you. Money you save today will make you happier in the future.
Keeping the likelihood of (1) constant while raising the likelihood of (2) makes cryonics a better bet.