One thing people often seem to miss on LW, when discussing cryonics, is the cost of the operation. People seem to often operate under illusion that if the cost of process is, say, $50 000, you don’t need to worry about it that much since you can get a insurance, and thus pay only few hundred a year or so. This has made me wonder, since, insurance most likely makes it cost more, not less, and only works to offer protection from the case of you dying a lot earlier than insurance company would predict, which, you know, is unlikely.
This combined with the fact that even if you pay that cost, $50 000, you still are not guaranteed to be awakened in a better future. If the chance is 1⁄10, your expected utility is same as saving your life using surefire method for $500 000, and the chance is by most estimates lower than 1⁄10.
This is just to present my reasons for not getting cryonics deal even if I happened to live in a country where it would be realistically possible. Insurance doesn’t make your expected utility of signing up for cryonics any better, and even if you valued your life more than $50 000, it would be at least problematic to say if that was really the best you can do with all that money. Say you spent the same amount of a food that was a bit healthier than what you’re eating now, or paid someone to clean up your house and thus avoid stress regarding that and thus increasing your expected lifespan, it could easily be argued that you’re using that money better than our hypothetical cryonicists. And those are hardly the only and the best uses your $50 000 can have.
Of course, things get more difficult if you have only around 20 years or less to live. Still, I’m not sure if giving going through something that unlikely is going to help you and has huge costs is the best option.
Don’t forget that if it works, you probably get immortality too. If you were already immortal, would you be willing to become mortal for $500 000?
I’m not sure if this can be reversed just like that. If the immortality is possible at that world, you could just use part of that $500 000 to spring back to immortality, and I’m a bit unsure about how denying that affects our hypothetical situation and how it compares to the original dilemma.
But this would be quite close to the original for someone whose lifespan is almost over, so that money doesn’t have the time to change anything else for him. Still, one point that makes me wonder is that comparatively, we’d expect $500 000 be worth much less in the world where immortality is commonplace enough for you to have it, whereas now it’s really much. Do we assume that in this new world, $500 000 has same comparative edge as it would have in our world, or in other words, amount of money/people in the world remains the same?
The point of the insurance isn’t to help you. The point of using insurance is because there were problems with the early cryonics organizations where people were prepped for cryonics with money supposedly going to come from their estates and then the money never materialized. The insurance makes sure that the organizations get enough funds. It doesn’t make things less expensive for the person to be preserved.
Sure, but I’ve gotten the impression that if someone mentions that they are not sure if the cryonics is worth the money, people come mentioning that “it’s actually only a year”, fallacy that I wanted to point out.
One thing people often seem to miss on LW, when discussing cryonics, is the cost of the operation. People seem to often operate under illusion that if the cost of process is, say, $50 000, you don’t need to worry about it that much since you can get a insurance, and thus pay only few hundred a year or so. This has made me wonder, since, insurance most likely makes it cost more, not less, and only works to offer protection from the case of you dying a lot earlier than insurance company would predict, which, you know, is unlikely.
This combined with the fact that even if you pay that cost, $50 000, you still are not guaranteed to be awakened in a better future. If the chance is 1⁄10, your expected utility is same as saving your life using surefire method for $500 000, and the chance is by most estimates lower than 1⁄10.
This is just to present my reasons for not getting cryonics deal even if I happened to live in a country where it would be realistically possible. Insurance doesn’t make your expected utility of signing up for cryonics any better, and even if you valued your life more than $50 000, it would be at least problematic to say if that was really the best you can do with all that money. Say you spent the same amount of a food that was a bit healthier than what you’re eating now, or paid someone to clean up your house and thus avoid stress regarding that and thus increasing your expected lifespan, it could easily be argued that you’re using that money better than our hypothetical cryonicists. And those are hardly the only and the best uses your $50 000 can have.
Of course, things get more difficult if you have only around 20 years or less to live. Still, I’m not sure if giving going through something that unlikely is going to help you and has huge costs is the best option.
Don’t forget that if it works, you probably get immortality too. If you were already immortal, would you be willing to become mortal for $500 000?
I really have to remember that frame for cryonics.
I’m not sure if this can be reversed just like that. If the immortality is possible at that world, you could just use part of that $500 000 to spring back to immortality, and I’m a bit unsure about how denying that affects our hypothetical situation and how it compares to the original dilemma.
But this would be quite close to the original for someone whose lifespan is almost over, so that money doesn’t have the time to change anything else for him. Still, one point that makes me wonder is that comparatively, we’d expect $500 000 be worth much less in the world where immortality is commonplace enough for you to have it, whereas now it’s really much. Do we assume that in this new world, $500 000 has same comparative edge as it would have in our world, or in other words, amount of money/people in the world remains the same?
The point of the insurance isn’t to help you. The point of using insurance is because there were problems with the early cryonics organizations where people were prepped for cryonics with money supposedly going to come from their estates and then the money never materialized. The insurance makes sure that the organizations get enough funds. It doesn’t make things less expensive for the person to be preserved.
Sure, but I’ve gotten the impression that if someone mentions that they are not sure if the cryonics is worth the money, people come mentioning that “it’s actually only a year”, fallacy that I wanted to point out.
I don’t think that specific issue is a fallacy. In that context, one needs to just remember that utility does not scale linearly with amount of money.