A perfect utilitarian living a well-off life would devote themselves to altruism, finding
the most effective charitable options and putting their full work towards them. In a
utilitarianism for human beings, however, we have to reserve some of our time and money
for ourselves, for things we will enjoy, that will revitalize us, and that will keep us
going. Instead of considering every single choice in terms of whether it would make you
happy enough to justify the expenditure when the opportunity
cost is so high, it works well to set a
budget. You should give yourself
some amount of money to spend on yourself, in whatever way you like best.
Out of your self-spending budget you might buy housing, food, clothes, ice cream, or games.
For each of these, you consider how much money you have available, weigh whether the
purchase would be worth it, and decide to buy or not. This is the standard approach that
is used all over, by utilitarians and not, and it generally works well.
Considering cryonics, which category should we put it in? Is signing up for cryonics spending money as effectively
as possible to make the world better, or is it spending to make yourself happier? Could
buying cryonics for yourself have enough altruistic benefit to be up there with the most
cost-effective charities, or at least be in that range? To get some very
rough numbers, GiveWell estimates that the
AMF averts a death for each
$2500 donated, or under $100 per additional year of life. This may not be the best
altruistic option, but it sets a baseline cryonics would need to beat. Neuropreservation
costs around $80k, so for it to be more cost effective than giving to the AMF you would
need to think it’s at least 10% likely give you 8,000 years of additional life. Those
numbers are both very high, and keep in mind that we’re comparing something very
speculative to something much more heavily studied and we should expect less-studied
interventions to look worse the more into the details we get.
Cryonics should, however, benefit from being more widely adopted. Both the freezing
process and the long-term storage have many inefficiencies that come from being run at
very small-scales. Cryonics organizations would be less likely to collapse over time if
they were more central to our culture. If more people cared about freezing brains it
would be higher status to research it and the technology would likely improve. This would
bring down the costs and raise the probability of success. The question is, how much does your signing up do to improve these?
Perhaps if cryonics got up to 10% of the US population then the chances of success would be significantly higher. Linearity seems roughly right here, and the population is 300M, so your signup would bring us one 30 millionth of the way to 10%. This doesn’t seem big enough to be a major factor. Similarly, while it’s possible existential risks would be taken much more seriously if a substantial fraction of the population expected to live extremely long lives barring catastrophe, your signing up doesn’t bring us very far in that direction. Funding for the Future of Humanity institute probably goes much farther.
Even if you do think the benefit of a marginal person signing up is large enough to compete with top charities, it’s not clear that marginal person should be you. You should consider whether you could get these same benefits more efficiently through an organization that advocated people sign up for cryonics. With $80k to spend you should be able to get multiple signups, perhaps through running essay contests.
It’s also useful to step back, however, and consider how valuable it is to preserve and
revive people. If you’re a total hedonistic utilitarian, caring about there being as many good lives
over all time as possible, deaths averted isn’t the real metric. Instead the question is
how many lives will there be and how good are they? In a future society with the
technology to revive cryonics patients there would still be some kind of resource limits
bounding the number of people living or being emulated. Their higher technology would
probably allow them to have as many people alive as they chose, within those bounds. If
they decided to revive people, this would probably come in place of using those resources
to create additional people or run more copies of existing people. This suggests cryonics
doesn’t actually make there be more people, just changes which people there are. If you’re funding cryonics for the most intelligent, conscientious, or creative people then this might be somewhat useful, but the chances that any of us are the best candidate here are low.
(This applies less if you’re more of a preference utilitarian, trying to have as many satisfied preferences as possible. Death is generally a major preference violation, and fewer longer lives via cryonics would mean many fewer deaths.)
Even if signing up for cryonics isn’t the best thing you can do altruistically, though, that doesn’t mean you can’t do it. It just should be considered in the self-spending category, compared against
things like a nicer house, tastier food, or more travel. In deciding whether to purchase
cryonics for yourself the main consideration is how likely it is to work. If you think it
has a 20% chance, all things considered, you could probably find $1000/year in your budget
for it. At a 0.01% chance, however, it’s pretty likely that there’s something else which
would give you more enjoyment for the money. The cost is high enough that if you’re
considering cryonics it’s definitely worth it for you to put time into getting a good
handle on how likely it is. Breaking cryonics
down might be helpful
here, to help overcome the planning fallacy.
You should sign up for cryonics if you think it is likely to work.
The question is, how much does your signing up do to improve these? Even then, I would expect you could get these same benefits more efficiently through an organization that advocated people sign up for cryonics.
This aspect needs to be given more focus, I think, as it shows how a person might possibly attempt to achieve cryonics-related goals more efficiently by abstaining from signing up and instead donating to a charity which advertises cryonics.
for it to be more cost effective than giving to the AMF you would need to think it’s at least 10% likely give you 8,000 years of additional life.
This does not apply quite so straightforwardly to more general cryonics goals like achieving reversible vitrification and thus preventing death from a broad spectrum of diseases (including aging). If such a goal were achieved, it would dramatically increase the odds of cryonics being useful for the patient, which would increase adoption rates and also decrease use of heroic measures that prolong suffering.
Someone might hope to achieve such goals more effectively by donating to a research facility directly instead of signing up, but then again signing up does probably have a positive effect overall.
Also, the idea that there might be significant x-risk reduction in people anticipating extended life is another source of utility to factor in. Another notion to consider is that a utilitarian might join a cryonics organization for the chance to network with a group of relatively wealthy individuals, with the goal of attracting donations to proven causes like AMF.
If you’re a total utilitarian, caring about there being as many good lives over all time as possible, deaths averted isn’t a real metric. Instead the question is how many lives will there be and how good are they?
You lost me there. As I understand it, a total utilitarian cares about utility for all lives over all time, but that doesn’t indicate that they don’t disvalue death in and of itself. I could perhaps be a total utilitarian, but I think death is a negative event that isn’t fully negated, utility-wise, by the creation of new people. So a world where more deaths occurred is one that I would prefer less than one where fewer deaths occurred, even if the same number of people exist in the end.
more general cryonics goals like achieving reversible vitrification
Do people have the impression that signing up for cryonics makes reversible vitrification much more likely? My understanding was that the current vitrification process as used for cryonics is extremely toxic, but that’s fine because the most likely revival process would be scanning. I would expect future brain preservation research to be focused on issues like getting the cryoprotectant through the whole brain as quickly as possible, test scans of cryogenically preserved brains to see what level of detail is being kept currently, and alternative methods like plastination. While reversible vitrification would clearly be valuable for both cryonics and medicine in general, I think if you want more research into it you would need to explicitly fund it and you’re not going to get much of it as a spillover from signing up for the current version.
signing up does probably have a positive effect overall
It’s not just “is the effect positive” but “is the effect in the same range as the current best options”. If you think it’s 1/100th as much good for your money as donating to the best charity then you could count 1% of the spending as altruistic and the rest as self-spending, but I think you need to get up to at least 1/10th before this bookkeeping becomes worth it.
the idea that there might be significant x-risk reduction in people anticipating extended life
This effect is roughly proportional to the number of people signed up, and you could probably convince multiple people to sign up with $80k worth of promotion. Even then, I’m not sure the x-risk reduction benefits here are large, especially compared with simply going around explaining the idea of x-risk.
a utilitarian might join a cryonics organization for the chance to network with a group of relatively wealthy individuals, with the goal of attracting donations to proven causes like AMF.
If you’re going to spend your time networking with wealthy people trying to get them to donate to better causes, is the pool of cryonics subscribers atypically good? How much time do you get to spend with other cryonics enthusiasts? How open to suggestions are they about donations? I would be surprised if this worked well.
a total utilitarian cares about utility for all lives over all time
What kind of utility are you thinking about? I was writing for someone with a vaguely hedonistic view, where death is bad because of the effect it has on those that remain and because it removes the possibility for future joy on the part of the deceased (if you’re not at malthusian limits). A preference utilitarian will see death differently, though, as a massive violation of preferences.
Thanks for the feedback; several things I want to go back and edit now. Is that ok, or are submissions one-time?
Do people have the impression that signing up for cryonics makes reversible vitrification much more likely?
I certainly assign it high probability (although not necessarily that it is the best way to accomplish this specific goal). The only scientists that I’m aware of pursuing the goal of whole organ vitrification are Greg Fahy and Brian Wowk of 21st Century Medicine, who are also cryonicists and whose main source of funding seems to be cryonics. Chana and Aschwin de Wolf are also cryonicists, and do neural cryobiology experiments—a topic that is basically unheard of outside of cryonics.
My understanding was that the current vitrification process as used for cryonics is extremely toxic, but that’s fine because the most likely revival process would be scanning.
I would describe it as somewhat toxic, but not on par with say fixatives. Effective toxicity is dependent on exposure time, so faster cooling is a factor there. In any case, vitrification is something we can expect incremental improvements to result in higher viability in larger organs over time.
I would expect future brain preservation research to be focused on issues like getting the cryoprotectant through the whole brain as quickly as possible, test scans of cryogenically preserved brains to see what level of detail is being kept currently, and alternative methods like plastination.
Yes, scanning is good, but viability assays are arguably better in some respects because something that doesn’t harm viability is less likely to harm things that you can’t detect with current scanning tech.
If you vitrify a small slice of brain tissue, the cryoprotectant can be washed out and the cells will resume functioning. I expect work that improves viability in larger organs and whole brains to involve the discovery of less toxic cryoprotectants and/or delivery of such past cell membranes and the blood brain barrier. Another approach is supercooling, which allows lower concentrations of cryoprotectant because it avoids ice formation below the freezing point.
While reversible vitrification would clearly be valuable for both cryonics and medicine in general, I think if you want more research into it you would need to explicitly fund it and you’re not going to get much of it as a spillover from signing up for the current version.
That seems like a reasonable position, but it could be wrong due to network effects and so forth. I don’t see any kind of public outreach designed to get people to donate money to focused cryonics research, rather I see private networking between wealthy cryonicists as being the major factor in the present environment. That’s something that can be affected indirectly by an individual signing up (by influencing wealthy people in your social network to become interested), I think.
It’s not just “is the effect positive” but “is the effect in the same range as the current best options”. If you think it’s 1/100th as much good for your money as donating to the best charity then you could count 1% of the spending as altruistic and the rest as self-spending, but I think you need to get up to at least 1/10th before this bookkeeping becomes worth it.
Perhaps, but note that the significance of x-risk overall is higher in a world where everyone lives a lot longer. So the percent to which this matters should be affected by your confidence in the soon discovery of life extension (even if you don’t personally experience life extension).
What kind of utility are you thinking about? I was writing for someone with a vaguely hedonistic view, where death is bad because of the effect it has on those that remain and because it removes the possibility for future joy on the part of the deceased (if you’re not at malthusian limits). A preference utilitarian will see death differently, though, as a massive violation of preferences.
I’m thinking that some kind of preference-based utility could still be considered as a total over time—the more sentient beings whose preferences are met over time, the more utility there is.
I’ve made some edits. There’s a more general point I want to make about how if you think there are lots of potential small benefits to cryonics you probably do better altruistically to pick the one you think is most important (xrisk reduction, medical benefits of vitrification tech, convincing wealthy people to donate to the AMF) and just work on that, but I’m not happy with my phrasing yet,
Okay. Here is my interpretation of your essay in terms of the three questions (hopefully this will help clarify the gaps I am hoping to fill with the contest):
Why would a utilitarian contribute to cryonics?Because part of their budget as a realistic human being is for selfish needs, which includes things like cryonics and sportscars.
What would be an opimal way to conribute to cryonics?By signing up for it, if you happen to desire it, to satisfy selfish needs within your budget so that the rest of the budget can go to other things.
Would a utilitarian prefer to contribute to cryonics as a charity, or would they sign up for it directly?They would sign up for it directly, since the charitable portion of their budget should go towards other things.
I find these implicit answers… unsatisfying. They do sort of work for defusing those who would hate on cryonics because of the utilitarian costs, but I don’t see them as the strongest possible presentation of its utilitarian advantages.
First of all, the chances of cryonics working for an individual who signs up for it are not necessarily the most relevant criteria when considering total utility of participation in the movement. To give some examples, it seems like it would be dwarfed by the utility of hastening the advent of reversible clinical vitrification (bringing an end to disease as we know it), or x-risk prevention due to anticipating distant future existence. Neither of those is reliant on it working for an individual who signs up today, and they aren’t really the motivating factor for anyone signing up cryonics, rather they are more along the lines of spillover benefits.
Secondly, the argument from budgetary spending looks weaker to me compared to (say) the prospect of trading with wealthy cryonauts for increased funding towards proven causes like AMF. While cryonics includes many middle class people, it has a disproportionately high number of doctors and other comparatively wealthy people, who could potentially direct more resources to the causes preferred by the utilitarian if they saw it as advantageous to do so. This isn’t necessarily a sign of cryonics utility, but it is something about cryonics that a utilitarian might reasonably be expected to care about (more than the selfish expenditure aspect, I would think) and look for ways to exploit in some game-theoretic manner. For a simple example of this kind of trade, see the intro to this fanfiction.
Thirdly, I find it plausible that (some) total utilitarians could care a lot more about deaths averted than about lives created. Death could be considered a dignificant source of total disutility whereas new lives created do not add as much utility as deaths cost. Some antinatalists cite the prospect of death as a source of extreme disutility that outweighs the utility of birth/life-creation. But the disutility of this prospect could be reduced by making sure the death occurs dramatically further in the future (or never, depending if immortality is possible). If something along these lines decribes your utility function, it should imply a very strong preference to advance the state of the art in cryonics, and/or cryonics adoption rates (unless you think another form of indefinite life extension is more likely to work sooner).
A perfect utilitarian living a well-off life would devote themselves to altruism, finding the most effective charitable options and putting their full work towards them. In a utilitarianism for human beings, however, we have to reserve some of our time and money for ourselves, for things we will enjoy, that will revitalize us, and that will keep us going. Instead of considering every single choice in terms of whether it would make you happy enough to justify the expenditure when the opportunity cost is so high, it works well to set a budget. You should give yourself some amount of money to spend on yourself, in whatever way you like best.
Out of your self-spending budget you might buy housing, food, clothes, ice cream, or games. For each of these, you consider how much money you have available, weigh whether the purchase would be worth it, and decide to buy or not. This is the standard approach that is used all over, by utilitarians and not, and it generally works well.
Considering cryonics, which category should we put it in? Is signing up for cryonics spending money as effectively as possible to make the world better, or is it spending to make yourself happier? Could buying cryonics for yourself have enough altruistic benefit to be up there with the most cost-effective charities, or at least be in that range? To get some very rough numbers, GiveWell estimates that the AMF averts a death for each $2500 donated, or under $100 per additional year of life. This may not be the best altruistic option, but it sets a baseline cryonics would need to beat. Neuropreservation costs around $80k, so for it to be more cost effective than giving to the AMF you would need to think it’s at least 10% likely give you 8,000 years of additional life. Those numbers are both very high, and keep in mind that we’re comparing something very speculative to something much more heavily studied and we should expect less-studied interventions to look worse the more into the details we get.
Cryonics should, however, benefit from being more widely adopted. Both the freezing process and the long-term storage have many inefficiencies that come from being run at very small-scales. Cryonics organizations would be less likely to collapse over time if they were more central to our culture. If more people cared about freezing brains it would be higher status to research it and the technology would likely improve. This would bring down the costs and raise the probability of success. The question is, how much does your signing up do to improve these?
Perhaps if cryonics got up to 10% of the US population then the chances of success would be significantly higher. Linearity seems roughly right here, and the population is 300M, so your signup would bring us one 30 millionth of the way to 10%. This doesn’t seem big enough to be a major factor. Similarly, while it’s possible existential risks would be taken much more seriously if a substantial fraction of the population expected to live extremely long lives barring catastrophe, your signing up doesn’t bring us very far in that direction. Funding for the Future of Humanity institute probably goes much farther.
Even if you do think the benefit of a marginal person signing up is large enough to compete with top charities, it’s not clear that marginal person should be you. You should consider whether you could get these same benefits more efficiently through an organization that advocated people sign up for cryonics. With $80k to spend you should be able to get multiple signups, perhaps through running essay contests.
It’s also useful to step back, however, and consider how valuable it is to preserve and revive people. If you’re a total hedonistic utilitarian, caring about there being as many good lives over all time as possible, deaths averted isn’t the real metric. Instead the question is how many lives will there be and how good are they? In a future society with the technology to revive cryonics patients there would still be some kind of resource limits bounding the number of people living or being emulated. Their higher technology would probably allow them to have as many people alive as they chose, within those bounds. If they decided to revive people, this would probably come in place of using those resources to create additional people or run more copies of existing people. This suggests cryonics doesn’t actually make there be more people, just changes which people there are. If you’re funding cryonics for the most intelligent, conscientious, or creative people then this might be somewhat useful, but the chances that any of us are the best candidate here are low.
(This applies less if you’re more of a preference utilitarian, trying to have as many satisfied preferences as possible. Death is generally a major preference violation, and fewer longer lives via cryonics would mean many fewer deaths.)
Even if signing up for cryonics isn’t the best thing you can do altruistically, though, that doesn’t mean you can’t do it. It just should be considered in the self-spending category, compared against things like a nicer house, tastier food, or more travel. In deciding whether to purchase cryonics for yourself the main consideration is how likely it is to work. If you think it has a 20% chance, all things considered, you could probably find $1000/year in your budget for it. At a 0.01% chance, however, it’s pretty likely that there’s something else which would give you more enjoyment for the money. The cost is high enough that if you’re considering cryonics it’s definitely worth it for you to put time into getting a good handle on how likely it is. Breaking cryonics down might be helpful here, to help overcome the planning fallacy.
You should sign up for cryonics if you think it is likely to work.
This aspect needs to be given more focus, I think, as it shows how a person might possibly attempt to achieve cryonics-related goals more efficiently by abstaining from signing up and instead donating to a charity which advertises cryonics.
This does not apply quite so straightforwardly to more general cryonics goals like achieving reversible vitrification and thus preventing death from a broad spectrum of diseases (including aging). If such a goal were achieved, it would dramatically increase the odds of cryonics being useful for the patient, which would increase adoption rates and also decrease use of heroic measures that prolong suffering.
Someone might hope to achieve such goals more effectively by donating to a research facility directly instead of signing up, but then again signing up does probably have a positive effect overall.
Also, the idea that there might be significant x-risk reduction in people anticipating extended life is another source of utility to factor in. Another notion to consider is that a utilitarian might join a cryonics organization for the chance to network with a group of relatively wealthy individuals, with the goal of attracting donations to proven causes like AMF.
You lost me there. As I understand it, a total utilitarian cares about utility for all lives over all time, but that doesn’t indicate that they don’t disvalue death in and of itself. I could perhaps be a total utilitarian, but I think death is a negative event that isn’t fully negated, utility-wise, by the creation of new people. So a world where more deaths occurred is one that I would prefer less than one where fewer deaths occurred, even if the same number of people exist in the end.
Makes sense. I should like to expand that some.
Do people have the impression that signing up for cryonics makes reversible vitrification much more likely? My understanding was that the current vitrification process as used for cryonics is extremely toxic, but that’s fine because the most likely revival process would be scanning. I would expect future brain preservation research to be focused on issues like getting the cryoprotectant through the whole brain as quickly as possible, test scans of cryogenically preserved brains to see what level of detail is being kept currently, and alternative methods like plastination. While reversible vitrification would clearly be valuable for both cryonics and medicine in general, I think if you want more research into it you would need to explicitly fund it and you’re not going to get much of it as a spillover from signing up for the current version.
It’s not just “is the effect positive” but “is the effect in the same range as the current best options”. If you think it’s 1/100th as much good for your money as donating to the best charity then you could count 1% of the spending as altruistic and the rest as self-spending, but I think you need to get up to at least 1/10th before this bookkeeping becomes worth it.
This effect is roughly proportional to the number of people signed up, and you could probably convince multiple people to sign up with $80k worth of promotion. Even then, I’m not sure the x-risk reduction benefits here are large, especially compared with simply going around explaining the idea of x-risk.
If you’re going to spend your time networking with wealthy people trying to get them to donate to better causes, is the pool of cryonics subscribers atypically good? How much time do you get to spend with other cryonics enthusiasts? How open to suggestions are they about donations? I would be surprised if this worked well.
What kind of utility are you thinking about? I was writing for someone with a vaguely hedonistic view, where death is bad because of the effect it has on those that remain and because it removes the possibility for future joy on the part of the deceased (if you’re not at malthusian limits). A preference utilitarian will see death differently, though, as a massive violation of preferences.
Thanks for the feedback; several things I want to go back and edit now. Is that ok, or are submissions one-time?
Feel free to make edits.
I certainly assign it high probability (although not necessarily that it is the best way to accomplish this specific goal). The only scientists that I’m aware of pursuing the goal of whole organ vitrification are Greg Fahy and Brian Wowk of 21st Century Medicine, who are also cryonicists and whose main source of funding seems to be cryonics. Chana and Aschwin de Wolf are also cryonicists, and do neural cryobiology experiments—a topic that is basically unheard of outside of cryonics.
I would describe it as somewhat toxic, but not on par with say fixatives. Effective toxicity is dependent on exposure time, so faster cooling is a factor there. In any case, vitrification is something we can expect incremental improvements to result in higher viability in larger organs over time.
Yes, scanning is good, but viability assays are arguably better in some respects because something that doesn’t harm viability is less likely to harm things that you can’t detect with current scanning tech.
If you vitrify a small slice of brain tissue, the cryoprotectant can be washed out and the cells will resume functioning. I expect work that improves viability in larger organs and whole brains to involve the discovery of less toxic cryoprotectants and/or delivery of such past cell membranes and the blood brain barrier. Another approach is supercooling, which allows lower concentrations of cryoprotectant because it avoids ice formation below the freezing point.
That seems like a reasonable position, but it could be wrong due to network effects and so forth. I don’t see any kind of public outreach designed to get people to donate money to focused cryonics research, rather I see private networking between wealthy cryonicists as being the major factor in the present environment. That’s something that can be affected indirectly by an individual signing up (by influencing wealthy people in your social network to become interested), I think.
Perhaps, but note that the significance of x-risk overall is higher in a world where everyone lives a lot longer. So the percent to which this matters should be affected by your confidence in the soon discovery of life extension (even if you don’t personally experience life extension).
I’m thinking that some kind of preference-based utility could still be considered as a total over time—the more sentient beings whose preferences are met over time, the more utility there is.
I’ve made some edits. There’s a more general point I want to make about how if you think there are lots of potential small benefits to cryonics you probably do better altruistically to pick the one you think is most important (xrisk reduction, medical benefits of vitrification tech, convincing wealthy people to donate to the AMF) and just work on that, but I’m not happy with my phrasing yet,
Okay. Here is my interpretation of your essay in terms of the three questions (hopefully this will help clarify the gaps I am hoping to fill with the contest):
Why would a utilitarian contribute to cryonics? Because part of their budget as a realistic human being is for selfish needs, which includes things like cryonics and sportscars.
What would be an opimal way to conribute to cryonics? By signing up for it, if you happen to desire it, to satisfy selfish needs within your budget so that the rest of the budget can go to other things.
Would a utilitarian prefer to contribute to cryonics as a charity, or would they sign up for it directly? They would sign up for it directly, since the charitable portion of their budget should go towards other things.
I find these implicit answers… unsatisfying. They do sort of work for defusing those who would hate on cryonics because of the utilitarian costs, but I don’t see them as the strongest possible presentation of its utilitarian advantages.
First of all, the chances of cryonics working for an individual who signs up for it are not necessarily the most relevant criteria when considering total utility of participation in the movement. To give some examples, it seems like it would be dwarfed by the utility of hastening the advent of reversible clinical vitrification (bringing an end to disease as we know it), or x-risk prevention due to anticipating distant future existence. Neither of those is reliant on it working for an individual who signs up today, and they aren’t really the motivating factor for anyone signing up cryonics, rather they are more along the lines of spillover benefits.
Secondly, the argument from budgetary spending looks weaker to me compared to (say) the prospect of trading with wealthy cryonauts for increased funding towards proven causes like AMF. While cryonics includes many middle class people, it has a disproportionately high number of doctors and other comparatively wealthy people, who could potentially direct more resources to the causes preferred by the utilitarian if they saw it as advantageous to do so. This isn’t necessarily a sign of cryonics utility, but it is something about cryonics that a utilitarian might reasonably be expected to care about (more than the selfish expenditure aspect, I would think) and look for ways to exploit in some game-theoretic manner. For a simple example of this kind of trade, see the intro to this fanfiction.
Thirdly, I find it plausible that (some) total utilitarians could care a lot more about deaths averted than about lives created. Death could be considered a dignificant source of total disutility whereas new lives created do not add as much utility as deaths cost. Some antinatalists cite the prospect of death as a source of extreme disutility that outweighs the utility of birth/life-creation. But the disutility of this prospect could be reduced by making sure the death occurs dramatically further in the future (or never, depending if immortality is possible). If something along these lines decribes your utility function, it should imply a very strong preference to advance the state of the art in cryonics, and/or cryonics adoption rates (unless you think another form of indefinite life extension is more likely to work sooner).