Thanks Josh, your comments have been informative and I’m glad you made them! A major thing that I think this reveals is that I personally am quite risk-averse — I’m willing to pay a premium for maybe-slightly-better perfusion even though that field is so murky, and for life insurance that won’t just stop covering me. A maybe-related personality trait is low confidence, so like even if I believe the arguments for short timelines, I don’t have enough confidence in that belief to take on (what I perceive to be) the risk of term insurance just based on that.
Also, I and the three other people who I’ve helped through this process so far could afford to add an extra ~$150/month expense, so the significantly higher cost wasn’t a major deterrent. If I were financially constrained I do expect I would have made different decisions.
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I think you’re right about most insurance companies being compatible with CI, and based on Oge’s signup guide, it seems like most can be made compatible with Alcor as well. Looking at it now, I probably should have been clearer about that, but since it wasn’t something I’d looked into in any depth, I didn’t feel very comfortable writing about it. If you or someone else wanted to write in more detail about how exactly that works I’d be happy to add it to the sequence.
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I also want to ask if you have any standby arrangements? I think that’s a meaningful difference between signing up with CI vs Alcor, because as I said at some point in the sequence, ischemic time matters way more for preservation quality than what perfusion technique is used. (Like, if I lived in Ann Arbor, I would almost certainly sign up with CI no matter what.) Maybe this is just my intense risk-aversion showing again, but it seems to me that cryonics arrangements without standby arrangements might be nearly useless, and that’s something I would worry about with CI.
I also want to ask if you have any standby arrangements? I think that’s a meaningful difference between signing up with CI vs Alcor, because as I said at some point in the sequence, ischemic time matters way more for preservation quality than what perfusion technique is used. (Like, if I lived in Ann Arbor, I would almost certainly sign up with CI no matter what.) Maybe this is just my intense risk-aversion showing again, but it seems to me that cryonics arrangements without standby arrangements might be nearly useless, and that’s something I would worry about with CI.
To me this didn’t feel like a meaningful difference between Alcor and CI when I signed up. CI is very closely aligned with Suspended Animation, which does standby and transport. I do believe you can sign up for CI without signing up for Suspended Animation, but by default everything is sent and obtained together seamlessly with CI as the sole/only needed point of contact (they work closely enough with SA that most will likely never explicitly interact with SA).
I hate to use an analogy involving bad, typically non-vegan food (for some reason I’m not quickly coming up with an alternative), but I think to me the difference was something like wanting vegan chicken and a vegan burger and going to an A&W+KFC that serves those (https://live.staticflickr.com/5057/5389457870_37d10fc914_b.jpg) vs. going to a single restaurant that itself serves both. Either way felt like pretty OK solutions.
(I also appreciate the rest of your comment and think that your hypotheses make sense!)
Thanks Josh, your comments have been informative and I’m glad you made them! A major thing that I think this reveals is that I personally am quite risk-averse — I’m willing to pay a premium for maybe-slightly-better perfusion even though that field is so murky, and for life insurance that won’t just stop covering me. A maybe-related personality trait is low confidence, so like even if I believe the arguments for short timelines, I don’t have enough confidence in that belief to take on (what I perceive to be) the risk of term insurance just based on that.
Also, I and the three other people who I’ve helped through this process so far could afford to add an extra ~$150/month expense, so the significantly higher cost wasn’t a major deterrent. If I were financially constrained I do expect I would have made different decisions.
-
I think you’re right about most insurance companies being compatible with CI, and based on Oge’s signup guide, it seems like most can be made compatible with Alcor as well. Looking at it now, I probably should have been clearer about that, but since it wasn’t something I’d looked into in any depth, I didn’t feel very comfortable writing about it. If you or someone else wanted to write in more detail about how exactly that works I’d be happy to add it to the sequence.
-
I also want to ask if you have any standby arrangements? I think that’s a meaningful difference between signing up with CI vs Alcor, because as I said at some point in the sequence, ischemic time matters way more for preservation quality than what perfusion technique is used. (Like, if I lived in Ann Arbor, I would almost certainly sign up with CI no matter what.) Maybe this is just my intense risk-aversion showing again, but it seems to me that cryonics arrangements without standby arrangements might be nearly useless, and that’s something I would worry about with CI.
To me this didn’t feel like a meaningful difference between Alcor and CI when I signed up. CI is very closely aligned with Suspended Animation, which does standby and transport. I do believe you can sign up for CI without signing up for Suspended Animation, but by default everything is sent and obtained together seamlessly with CI as the sole/only needed point of contact (they work closely enough with SA that most will likely never explicitly interact with SA).
I hate to use an analogy involving bad, typically non-vegan food (for some reason I’m not quickly coming up with an alternative), but I think to me the difference was something like wanting vegan chicken and a vegan burger and going to an A&W+KFC that serves those (https://live.staticflickr.com/5057/5389457870_37d10fc914_b.jpg) vs. going to a single restaurant that itself serves both. Either way felt like pretty OK solutions.
(I also appreciate the rest of your comment and think that your hypotheses make sense!)