I chose actions that will increase your lifespan in general, since that’s strictly better than increasing the chance that if you live long enough for it to matter, you will live longer than your natural lifespan.
Evaluating the expected value of cryonics is hard because it runs into the same problem as Pascal’s Wager, with a huge value in a lowe probability case. I’m not really sure how to handle that.
The reasons I don’t think it’s likely to work right now are:
Current processes may not preserve human sized brains well at all even in ideal conditions (successful cryonics experiments seem to involve animals much smaller than our brains)
Alcor may not do the preservation perfectly
The technology to reconstruct our brains from frozen ones may not be possible or might be so far off that the brain is damaged before it becomes possible
Alternately, you could use whole body preservation, but then the problems in my first point are significantly worse.
In non ideal conditions, your brain is dead and breaking down, and losing information permanently. A sufficiently powerful AI might be able to make reasonable guesses, but it’s not clear how much the person they create would really be you after extensive damage.
And this last one brings up my first point again: if I want to not die, it’s much more effective to drive safely (or not drive), get adequate medical care, exercise, etc. than to focus in the small chance of surviving after my body is already dying.
I chose actions that will increase your lifespan in general, since that’s strictly better than increasing the chance that if you live long enough for it to matter, you will live longer than your natural lifespan.
Evaluating the expected value of cryonics is hard because it runs into the same problem as Pascal’s Wager, with a huge value in a lowe probability case. I’m not really sure how to handle that.
The reasons I don’t think it’s likely to work right now are:
Current processes may not preserve human sized brains well at all even in ideal conditions (successful cryonics experiments seem to involve animals much smaller than our brains)
Alcor may not do the preservation perfectly
The technology to reconstruct our brains from frozen ones may not be possible or might be so far off that the brain is damaged before it becomes possible
Alternately, you could use whole body preservation, but then the problems in my first point are significantly worse.
In non ideal conditions, your brain is dead and breaking down, and losing information permanently. A sufficiently powerful AI might be able to make reasonable guesses, but it’s not clear how much the person they create would really be you after extensive damage.
The leading causes of death for people aged 15-34 are injury, suicide, and homicide. All of those have a might chance of involving trauma to the head, which makes things much worse. For example, someone who dies in a car crash is probably not going to get much value from cryonics. https://www.cdc.gov/injury/images/lc-charts/leading_causes_of_death_age_group_2014_1050w760h.gif
And this last one brings up my first point again: if I want to not die, it’s much more effective to drive safely (or not drive), get adequate medical care, exercise, etc. than to focus in the small chance of surviving after my body is already dying.