The more reasonable question is the first one: do you think it’s likely that your chosen cryonics provider will remain financially solvent until resuscitation becomes possible?
I think it’s a legitimate concern, given the track record of businesses in general (although if quantum immortality reasoning applies anywhere, it has to apply to cryonic resuscitation, so it suffices to have some plausible future where the provider stays in business— which seems virtually certain to be the case).
It’s not the business going bust you have to worry about, it’s the patient care trust. My impression is that trusts do mostly last a long time, but I don’t know how best to get statistics on that.
yes there are a lot of issues. Probably the way to go is to look for a law review article on the subject. Someone with free lexis-nexis (or westlaw) could help here.
cryonics is about as far as you can get from a plain vanilla contractual issue. If you are going to invest a lot of money in it I hope that you investigate these pitfalls before putting down your cash Eliezer.
I have been looking into this at some length, and basically it appears that no-one has ever put work into understanding the details and come to a strongly negative conclusion. I would be absolutely astonished (around +20db) if there was a law review article dealing with specifically cryonics-related issues that didn’t come to a positive conclusion, not because I’m that confident that it’s good but because I’m very confident that no critic has ever put that much work in.
So, if you have a negative conclusion to present, please don’t dash off a comment here without really looking into it—I can already find plenty of material like that, and it’s not very helpful. Please, look into the details, and make a blog post or such somewhere.
I know you’re not Eliezer, I was addressing him because I assumed that he was the only one who had or was considering paying for cryonics here.
This site is my means of researching cryonics as I generally assume that motivated intelligent individuals such as yourselves will be equiped with any available facts to defend your positions. A sort of efficient information market hypothesis.
I also assume that I will not receive contracted services in situations where I lack leverage. This leverage could be litigation with a positive expected return or even better the threat of nonpayment. In the instance of cryonics all payments would have been made up front so the later does not apply. The chances of litigation success seem dim at first blush inlight of the issues mentioned in my posts above and below by mattnewport and others. I assumed that if there is evidence that cryonic contracts might be legally enforceable (from a perspective of legal realism) that you guys would have it here as you are smart and incentivized to research this issue (due to your financial and intellectual investment in it). The fact that you guys have no such evidence signals to me that it likely does not exist. This does not inspire me to move away from my initial skepticism wrt cryonics or to invest time in researching it.
So no I won’t be looking into the details based on what I have seen so far.
Frankly, you don’t strike me as genuinely open to persuasion, but for the sake of any future readers I’ll note the following:
1) I expect cryonics patients to actually be revived by artificial superintelligences subsequent to an intelligence explosion. My primary concern for making sure that cryonicists get revived is Friendly AI.
2) If this were not the case, I’d be concerned about the people running the cryonics companies. The cryonicists that I have met are not in it for the money. Cryonics is not an easy job or a wealthy profession! The cryonicists I have met are in it because they don’t want people to die. They are concerned with choosing successors with the same attitude, first because they don’t want people to die, and second because they expect their own revivals to be in their hands someday.
So you are willing to rely on the friendliness and competence of the cryonicists that you have met (at least to serve as stewards in the interim between your death and the emmergence of a FAI).
Well that is a personal judgment call for you to make.
You have got me all wrong. Really I was raising the question here so that you would be able to give me a stronger argument and put my doubts to rest precisely because I am interested in cryonics and do want to live forever. I posted in the hopes that I would be persuaded. Unfortunately, your personal faith in the individuals that you have met is not transferable.
It’d be best if names were attached to these hypothetical Mega Upvotes. You don’t normally want people to see your voting patterns, but if you’re upsetting the comment karma balance that much then it’d be best to have a name attached. Two kinds of currency would be clunky. There are other considerations that I’m too lazy to list out but generally they somewhat favor having names attached.
Are you out of shape and/or overweight? If so I will probably outlive you, why don’t you let me know what you would like on your tombstone.
How about the rest of you pro-cryonics individuals how many of you have latched onto this slim chance at immortality as a means of ignoring the consequences of your computer-bound Cheeto-eating lifestyle?
How about the rest of you pro-cryonics individuals how many of you have latched onto this slim chance at immortality as a means of ignoring the consequences of your computer-bound Cheeto-eating lifestyle?
The attitude tends to be more like: “Having your brain cryogenically preserved is the second worst thing that can happen to you.”
I run marathons, practice martial arts and work out at the gym 4 times a week. I dedicate a significant amount of my budget to healthy eating and optimal nutritional supplementation.
If you read through Alcor’s website, you’ll see that they are careful not to provide any promises and want their clients to be well-informed about the lack of any guarantees—this points to good intentions.
How convinced do you need to be to pay $25 a month? (I’m using the $300/year quote.)
If you die soon, you won’t have paid so much. If you don’t die soon, you can consider that you’re locking into a cheaper price for an option that might get more expensive once the science/culture is more established.
In 15 years, they might discover something that makes cryonics unlikely—and you might regret your $4,500 investment. Or they might revive a cryonically frozen puppy, in which case you would have been pleased that you were ‘cryonically covered’ the whole time, and possibly pleased you funded their research. A better cryonics company might come along, you might become more informed, and you can switch.
If you like the idea of it—and you seem to—why wouldn’t you participate in this early stage even when things are uncertain?
I need to be convinced that cryonics is better than nothing, and quite frankly I’m not.
For now I will stick to maintaining my good health through proven methods, maximizing my chances to live to see future advances in medicine. That seems to be the highest probability method of living practically forever, right? (and no I’m not trying to create a false-dilemma here, I know I could do both).
If cryonics were free and somebody else did all the work, I’m assuming you wouldn’t object to being signed up. So how cheap (in terms of both effort and money) would cryonics have to be in order to make it worthwhile for you?
at the level of confidence I have in it now I would not contribute any money, maybe $10 annual donation because i think it is a good cause.
If I was very rich I might contribute a large amount of money to cryonics research although I think I would rather spend on AGI or nanotech basic science.
I have a rather straightforward argument—well, I have an idea that I completely stole from someone else who might be significantly less confident of it than I am—anyway, I have an argument that there is a strong possibility, let’s call it 30% for kicks, that conditional on yer typical FAI FOOM outwards at lightspeed singularity, all humans who have died can be revived with very high accuracy. (In fact it can also work if FAI isn’t developed and human technology completely stagnates, but that scenario makes it less obvious.) This argument does not depend on the possibility of magic powers (e.g. questionably precise simulations by Friendly “counterfactual” quantum sibling branches), it applies to humans who were cremated, and it also applies to humans who lived before there was recorded history. Basically, there doesn’t have to be much of any local information around come FOOM.
Again, this argument is disjunctive with the unknown big angelic powers argument, and doesn’t necessitate aid from quantum siblings
You’ve done a lot of promotion of cryonics. There are good memetic engineering reasons. But are you really very confident that cryonics is necessary for an FAI to revive arbitrary dead human beings with ‘lots’ of detail? If not, is your lack of confidence taken into account in your seemingly-confident promotion of cryonics for its own sake rather than just as a memetic strategy to get folk into the whole ‘taking transhumanism/singularitarianism seriously’ clique?
I have a rather straightforward argument [...] anyway, I have an argument that there is a strong possibility [...] This argument does not depend on [...] Again, this argument is disjunctive with [...]
How foolish of you to ask. You’re supposed to revise your probability simply based on Will’s claim that he has an argument. That is how rational agreement works.
Bwa ha ha. I’ve already dropped way too many hints here and elsewhere, and I think it’s way too awesome for me to reveal given that I didn’t come up with it and there is a sharper more interesting more general more speculative idea that it would be best to introduce at the same time because the generalized argument leads to an that is even more awesome by like an order of magnitude (but is probably like an order of magnitude less probable (though that’s just from the addition of logical uncertainty, not a true conjunct)). (I’m kind of in an affective death spiral around it because it’s a great example of the kinds of crazy awesome things you can get from a single completely simple and obvious inferential step.)
Cryonics orgs that mistreat their patients lose their client base and can’t get new ones. They go bust. Orgs that have established a good record, like Alcor and the Cryonics Institute, have no reason to change strategy. Alcor has entirely separated the money for care of patients in an irrevocable trust, thus guarding against the majority of principal-agent problems, like embezzlement.
Note that Alcor is a charity and the CI is a non-profit. I have never assessed such orgs by how successfully I might sue them. I routinely look at how open they are with their finances and actions.
The more reasonable question is the first one: do you think it’s likely that your chosen cryonics provider will remain financially solvent until resuscitation becomes possible?
I think it’s a legitimate concern, given the track record of businesses in general (although if quantum immortality reasoning applies anywhere, it has to apply to cryonic resuscitation, so it suffices to have some plausible future where the provider stays in business— which seems virtually certain to be the case).
It’s not the business going bust you have to worry about, it’s the patient care trust. My impression is that trusts do mostly last a long time, but I don’t know how best to get statistics on that.
yes there are a lot of issues. Probably the way to go is to look for a law review article on the subject. Someone with free lexis-nexis (or westlaw) could help here.
cryonics is about as far as you can get from a plain vanilla contractual issue. If you are going to invest a lot of money in it I hope that you investigate these pitfalls before putting down your cash Eliezer.
I’m not Eliezer.
I have been looking into this at some length, and basically it appears that no-one has ever put work into understanding the details and come to a strongly negative conclusion. I would be absolutely astonished (around +20db) if there was a law review article dealing with specifically cryonics-related issues that didn’t come to a positive conclusion, not because I’m that confident that it’s good but because I’m very confident that no critic has ever put that much work in.
So, if you have a negative conclusion to present, please don’t dash off a comment here without really looking into it—I can already find plenty of material like that, and it’s not very helpful. Please, look into the details, and make a blog post or such somewhere.
I know you’re not Eliezer, I was addressing him because I assumed that he was the only one who had or was considering paying for cryonics here.
This site is my means of researching cryonics as I generally assume that motivated intelligent individuals such as yourselves will be equiped with any available facts to defend your positions. A sort of efficient information market hypothesis.
I also assume that I will not receive contracted services in situations where I lack leverage. This leverage could be litigation with a positive expected return or even better the threat of nonpayment. In the instance of cryonics all payments would have been made up front so the later does not apply. The chances of litigation success seem dim at first blush inlight of the issues mentioned in my posts above and below by mattnewport and others. I assumed that if there is evidence that cryonic contracts might be legally enforceable (from a perspective of legal realism) that you guys would have it here as you are smart and incentivized to research this issue (due to your financial and intellectual investment in it). The fact that you guys have no such evidence signals to me that it likely does not exist. This does not inspire me to move away from my initial skepticism wrt cryonics or to invest time in researching it.
So no I won’t be looking into the details based on what I have seen so far.
Frankly, you don’t strike me as genuinely open to persuasion, but for the sake of any future readers I’ll note the following:
1) I expect cryonics patients to actually be revived by artificial superintelligences subsequent to an intelligence explosion. My primary concern for making sure that cryonicists get revived is Friendly AI.
2) If this were not the case, I’d be concerned about the people running the cryonics companies. The cryonicists that I have met are not in it for the money. Cryonics is not an easy job or a wealthy profession! The cryonicists I have met are in it because they don’t want people to die. They are concerned with choosing successors with the same attitude, first because they don’t want people to die, and second because they expect their own revivals to be in their hands someday.
So you are willing to rely on the friendliness and competence of the cryonicists that you have met (at least to serve as stewards in the interim between your death and the emmergence of a FAI).
Well that is a personal judgment call for you to make.
You have got me all wrong. Really I was raising the question here so that you would be able to give me a stronger argument and put my doubts to rest precisely because I am interested in cryonics and do want to live forever. I posted in the hopes that I would be persuaded. Unfortunately, your personal faith in the individuals that you have met is not transferable.
Rest In Peace
1988 − 2016
He died signalling his cynical worldliness and sophistication to his peers.
It’s at times like this that I wish Less Wrong gave out a limited number of Mega Upvotes so I could upvote this 10 points instead of just 1.
It’d be best if names were attached to these hypothetical Mega Upvotes. You don’t normally want people to see your voting patterns, but if you’re upsetting the comment karma balance that much then it’d be best to have a name attached. Two kinds of currency would be clunky. There are other considerations that I’m too lazy to list out but generally they somewhat favor having names attached.
Are you out of shape and/or overweight? If so I will probably outlive you, why don’t you let me know what you would like on your tombstone.
How about the rest of you pro-cryonics individuals how many of you have latched onto this slim chance at immortality as a means of ignoring the consequences of your computer-bound Cheeto-eating lifestyle?
The attitude tends to be more like: “Having your brain cryogenically preserved is the second worst thing that can happen to you.”
I run marathons, practice martial arts and work out at the gym 4 times a week. I dedicate a significant amount of my budget to healthy eating and optimal nutritional supplementation.
good for you, except for the marathons of course, those are terrible for you.
I guess it is the type of thing I would like to do before I die though.
If you read through Alcor’s website, you’ll see that they are careful not to provide any promises and want their clients to be well-informed about the lack of any guarantees—this points to good intentions.
How convinced do you need to be to pay $25 a month? (I’m using the $300/year quote.)
If you die soon, you won’t have paid so much. If you don’t die soon, you can consider that you’re locking into a cheaper price for an option that might get more expensive once the science/culture is more established.
In 15 years, they might discover something that makes cryonics unlikely—and you might regret your $4,500 investment. Or they might revive a cryonically frozen puppy, in which case you would have been pleased that you were ‘cryonically covered’ the whole time, and possibly pleased you funded their research. A better cryonics company might come along, you might become more informed, and you can switch.
If you like the idea of it—and you seem to—why wouldn’t you participate in this early stage even when things are uncertain?
I need to be convinced that cryonics is better than nothing, and quite frankly I’m not.
For now I will stick to maintaining my good health through proven methods, maximizing my chances to live to see future advances in medicine. That seems to be the highest probability method of living practically forever, right? (and no I’m not trying to create a false-dilemma here, I know I could do both).
If cryonics were free and somebody else did all the work, I’m assuming you wouldn’t object to being signed up. So how cheap (in terms of both effort and money) would cryonics have to be in order to make it worthwhile for you?
yeah for free would be fine.
at the level of confidence I have in it now I would not contribute any money, maybe $10 annual donation because i think it is a good cause.
If I was very rich I might contribute a large amount of money to cryonics research although I think I would rather spend on AGI or nanotech basic science.
I have a rather straightforward argument—well, I have an idea that I completely stole from someone else who might be significantly less confident of it than I am—anyway, I have an argument that there is a strong possibility, let’s call it 30% for kicks, that conditional on yer typical FAI FOOM outwards at lightspeed singularity, all humans who have died can be revived with very high accuracy. (In fact it can also work if FAI isn’t developed and human technology completely stagnates, but that scenario makes it less obvious.) This argument does not depend on the possibility of magic powers (e.g. questionably precise simulations by Friendly “counterfactual” quantum sibling branches), it applies to humans who were cremated, and it also applies to humans who lived before there was recorded history. Basically, there doesn’t have to be much of any local information around come FOOM.
Again, this argument is disjunctive with the unknown big angelic powers argument, and doesn’t necessitate aid from quantum siblings
You’ve done a lot of promotion of cryonics. There are good memetic engineering reasons. But are you really very confident that cryonics is necessary for an FAI to revive arbitrary dead human beings with ‘lots’ of detail? If not, is your lack of confidence taken into account in your seemingly-confident promotion of cryonics for its own sake rather than just as a memetic strategy to get folk into the whole ‘taking transhumanism/singularitarianism seriously’ clique?
And that argument is … ?
How foolish of you to ask. You’re supposed to revise your probability simply based on Will’s claim that he has an argument. That is how rational agreement works.
Actually, rational agreement for humans involves betting. I’d like to find a way to bet on this one. AI-box style.
Bwa ha ha. I’ve already dropped way too many hints here and elsewhere, and I think it’s way too awesome for me to reveal given that I didn’t come up with it and there is a sharper more interesting more general more speculative idea that it would be best to introduce at the same time because the generalized argument leads to an that is even more awesome by like an order of magnitude (but is probably like an order of magnitude less probable (though that’s just from the addition of logical uncertainty, not a true conjunct)). (I’m kind of in an affective death spiral around it because it’s a great example of the kinds of crazy awesome things you can get from a single completely simple and obvious inferential step.)
Cryonics orgs that mistreat their patients lose their client base and can’t get new ones. They go bust. Orgs that have established a good record, like Alcor and the Cryonics Institute, have no reason to change strategy. Alcor has entirely separated the money for care of patients in an irrevocable trust, thus guarding against the majority of principal-agent problems, like embezzlement.
Note that Alcor is a charity and the CI is a non-profit. I have never assessed such orgs by how successfully I might sue them. I routinely look at how open they are with their finances and actions.