The most direct actions you can take to increase your expected lifespan (beyond obvious things like eating) are to exercise regularly, avoid cars and extreme sports, and possibly make changes to your diet.
I said cryonics was the most direct action for increasing one’s lifespan beyond the natural lifespan. The things you list are certainly the most direct actions for increasing your expected lifespan within its natural bounds. They may also indirectly increase your chance of living beyond your natural lifespan by increasing the chance you live to a point where life extension technology becomes available. Admittedly, I may place the chances of life extension technology being developed in the next 40 years lower than many less wrong readers.
With regards to my use of the survey statistics. I debated the best way to present those numbers that would be both clear and concise. For brevity I chose to lump the three “would like to” responses together because it actually made the objection to my core point look stronger. That is why I said “is consistent with”. Additionally, some percentage of “can’t afford” responses are actually respondents not placing a high enough priority on it rather than being literally unable to afford it. All that said, I do agree breaking out all the responses would be clearer.
I had to look through the survey data, but given that the median respondent said existing cryonics techniques have a 10% chance of working, it’s not surprising that a majority haven’t signed up for it.
I think this may be a failure to do the math. I’m not sure what chance I would give cryonics of working, but 10% may be high in my opinion. Still, when considering the value of being effectively immortal in a significantly better future even a 10% chance is highly valuable.
I wrote “Any course of action not involving going down and collecting the $100,000 would likely not be rational.” I’m not ignoring opportunity costs and other motivations here. That is why I said “likely not be rational”. I agree that in cryonics the opportunity costs are much higher than in my hypothetical example. I was attempting to establish the principle that action and belief should generally be in accord. That a large mismatch, as appears to me to be the case with cryonics, should call into question whether people are being rational. I don’t deny that a rational agent could genuinely believe cryonics might work but place a low enough probability on it and have a high enough opportunity cost that they should choose not to sign up.
I’m glad to hear you think cryonics is very promising and should be getting a lot more research funding than it does. I’m hoping that perhaps I will be able to make some improvement in that area.
I find your statement about the probability of cryonics not working in common cases being low interesting. Personally, it seems to me that the level of technology required to revive a cryonics patient preserved under ideal conditions today is so advanced that even patients preserved under less than ideal conditions will be revivable too. By less than ideal conditions I mean a delay of some time before preservation.
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 said cryonics was the most direct action for increasing one’s lifespan beyond the natural lifespan. The things you list are certainly the most direct actions for increasing your expected lifespan within its natural bounds. They may also indirectly increase your chance of living beyond your natural lifespan by increasing the chance you live to a point where life extension technology becomes available. Admittedly, I may place the chances of life extension technology being developed in the next 40 years lower than many less wrong readers.
With regards to my use of the survey statistics. I debated the best way to present those numbers that would be both clear and concise. For brevity I chose to lump the three “would like to” responses together because it actually made the objection to my core point look stronger. That is why I said “is consistent with”. Additionally, some percentage of “can’t afford” responses are actually respondents not placing a high enough priority on it rather than being literally unable to afford it. All that said, I do agree breaking out all the responses would be clearer.
I think this may be a failure to do the math. I’m not sure what chance I would give cryonics of working, but 10% may be high in my opinion. Still, when considering the value of being effectively immortal in a significantly better future even a 10% chance is highly valuable.
I wrote “Any course of action not involving going down and collecting the $100,000 would likely not be rational.” I’m not ignoring opportunity costs and other motivations here. That is why I said “likely not be rational”. I agree that in cryonics the opportunity costs are much higher than in my hypothetical example. I was attempting to establish the principle that action and belief should generally be in accord. That a large mismatch, as appears to me to be the case with cryonics, should call into question whether people are being rational. I don’t deny that a rational agent could genuinely believe cryonics might work but place a low enough probability on it and have a high enough opportunity cost that they should choose not to sign up.
I’m glad to hear you think cryonics is very promising and should be getting a lot more research funding than it does. I’m hoping that perhaps I will be able to make some improvement in that area.
I find your statement about the probability of cryonics not working in common cases being low interesting. Personally, it seems to me that the level of technology required to revive a cryonics patient preserved under ideal conditions today is so advanced that even patients preserved under less than ideal conditions will be revivable too. By less than ideal conditions I mean a delay of some time before preservation.
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.