My dear friend and mentor Curtis Henderson was little more than straight frozen because CI President Ben Best had this idea that adding polyethylene glycol to the CPA solution would inhibit edema. Now the thing is, Ben had been told by his own researchers that PEG was incompatible with DMSO containing solutions, and resulted in gel formation. Nevertheless, he decided he would try this out on Curtis Henderson. He did NOT do any bench experiments, or do test mixes of solutions, let alone any animal studies to validate that this approach would in fact help reduce edema (it doesn’t). Instead, he prepared a batch of this untested mixture, and AFTER it gelled, he tried to perfuse Curtis with it.
Mike Darwin believes they are providing substandard care, certainly not enough to ensure the possibility of revival.
And they go pretty badly. Go to: http://cryonics.org/refs.html#cases and start reading the case reports posted there. That’s pretty much my working definition of horrible. It seems apparent to me that “just getting frozen” is now all that is necessary for a ticket to tomorrow, and that anything else that is done is “just gravy,” and probably unnecessary to a happy outcome.
And the fact that they are licensed as a cemetery, and at any time the state can decide that cryonics doesn’t work and thaw everyone.
I am aware of the limitations and flaws of the CI, having read of them, among other places, in the various cryonics posts here at LW. However, I am also aware of the other limitations and flaws of Alcor that have also been posted. Neither organization offers a perfect solution—so I’ve weighed my options, including my physical proximity to CI’s storage facility and my finances, and made my choice. I’ve been hesitating on this for far too long, and at this point, I feel it’s better to simply pick either one rather than not pick one at all.
My current strategy is only useful if a better alternative to CI appears while I’m still alive. I currently plan on avoiding the lifetime membership at CI, instead going for the annual membership; and arranging the insurance so that I’ll be able to stop payments if need be, thus allowing for a relatively clean severance between myself and CI.
One possibility might be to join a group of like-minded individuals, such as the Society for Venturism, who are preparing to help their cryo-preserved members as necessary.
Any cryonics organization that makes a plausible public pledge to care for the patients of future cryonics orgs that fail suddenly accepts some risk. (Though much of the cost of cryonics is the initial procedure, there would also be transport and secure warehousing costs associated with accepting the patients of a failed org.) This cost is most likely passed on to its current members.
Any cryonics organization that does not make such a pledge can therefore provide cheaper care at a comparable standard, with the added benefit that in the event of failure, the patients of these orgs will be transferred to an org of the first type, should any exist.
One solution, as far as I can tell, is for orgs that wish to be of the first type make a plausible promise to not adopt outside patients, but then make “one-time exceptions” where possible when other orgs fail. (By analogy with Kant’s practice regarding marriage.)
I’ve been hesitating on this for far too long, and at this point, I feel it’s better to simply pick either one rather than not pick one at all.
Why are you in such a hurry?
It seems to me that if there are no credible options to extend you lifespan beyond what curent medical science can do, it’s best to just wait for one to show up rather than committing to a weak option with a negligible chance of succeding.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that such a strong option will never materialize during your lifetime, in which case you would just have avoided wasting your money and effort.
So the Defense Professor had told him; and while you could quibble about the details of the proverb, Harry understood the weaknesses of Ravenclaws well enough to know that you had to try answering your own quibbles. Did some plans call for waiting? Yes, many plans called for delayed action; but that was not the same as hesitating to choose. Not delaying because you knew the right moment to do what was necessary, but delaying because you couldn’t make up your mind—there was no cunning plan which called for that.
Did you sometimes need more information to choose? Yes, but that could also turn into an excuse for delaying; and it would be tempting to delay, when you were faced with a choice between two painful alternatives, and not choosing would avoid the mental pain for a time. So you would pick a piece of information you couldn’t easily obtain, and claim that you couldn’t possibly decide without it; that would be your excuse. Although if you knew what information you needed, knew when and how you would obtain that information, and knew what you would do depending on each possible observation, then that was less suspicious as an excuse for hesitating.
If you weren’t just hesitating, you ought to be able to choose in advance what you would do, once you had the extra information you claimed you needed.
I’ve previously looked a bit into cryonics, and flinched at how expensive the full package from Alcor was, especially given my fixed income. I thought something along the lines, “I want to sign up, but there’s no way I can afford that. Maybe if the prices drop before I die.”, and turned my attention to other matters. During my most recent looking into the matter, I looked more thoroughly into the matter. For example, I ran a few online insurance-quote generators, and found that, given my age and non-smoker status, the necessary life-insurance would only run me around $15/month.
If a better option materializes while I’m still alive, then it seems unlikely that my having signed up for cryonics now will prevent me from taking advantage of it. So, by signing up now, I have the advantage of not having cut off my future options, as well as having the cryonics package in case I do kick the bucket before then. If the LW arguments for cryonics add up, then I no longer have any good reason to delay; and, as far as I can tell, they do.
[ … ] If you weren’t just hesitating, you ought to be able to choose in advance what you would do, once you had the extra information you claimed you needed.
That would be useful advice only for an agent with unbounded rationality. A boundedly rational agent like an human can’t possibly plan in advance for every possible contingency.
Hesitation is not necessarily, or even usually, a bad thing: it’s an emotion that warns you against making important decisions without having extensively thought about all the options. Of course, too much hesitation can be crippling.
If a better option materializes while I’m still alive, then it seems unlikely that my having signed up for cryonics now will prevent me from taking advantage of it. So, by signing up now, I have the advantage of not having cut off my future options, as well as having the cryonics package in case I do kick the bucket before then.
Yes, but if the option you choose has negligible probability of succeding, then, with overwhelming probability you waste your money. 30 $ per month may not be much money for you, but you could as well spend them in lottery tickets and their expected utility would be in the same ballpark (that is, negligibly greater than zero).
If the LW arguments for cryonics add up, then I no longer have any good reason to delay; and, as far as I can tell, they do.
It seems to me that the arguments against outweight the arguments in favor. In particular:
The multiply chained nature of the probabilities involved in cryonics, and whether the final expected utility is worth the cost.
I don’t see this adressed in the arguments in favor.
A precise answer would depend on the probability of success, which I believe to be very low and difficult to estimate precisely, and on the payoff in case of success (some people believe that you wake up as an essentially immortal entity in a post-scarcity world, Robin Hanson believes that you wake up as a brain upload who has to slave his way through a Malthusian society, etc.)
Given the state of the uncertainties involved, my position is that unless someone provides a compelling argument for the probability of cryonics success being non-negligible, then any amount of money spent on it is a bad investment. You should not give in Pascal’s muggings.
Even if they were given it away for free, the effort and social costs may not be not be worth the expected payoff. Think of joining a religion: there is a technically non-zero probability that it will save your soul, but unless you are given evidence that this probability is non-negligible, this is not a good reason for joining, even if it is free.
There might be also social benefits, however. Joining an organized religion signals allegiance and gains you status within the community of its adherents. Likewise, signing up for cryonics signals allegiance and gains you status within the communities where cryonics is popular, mainly the transhumanist/singularitarian groups.
I suspect that the reason cryonics is relatively popular among the OB/LW folks is that Hanson and Yudkowsky strongly endorse it. Siding with the alphas is an easy way to gain status.
A precise answer would depend on the probability of success,
Alright—if that’s a datum you need to have before you give an answer, then what would your answer be if the best estimate possible for that probability was 50%? Or 5%? Or 0.05%?
and on the payoff in case of success
If that’s a datum you need, then in what way would you need that payoff described, measured, and/or estimated before you could give an answer, and for a few plausible payoffs, what would your answer be?
among the OB/LW folks
… Is that an indirect way of saying that you don’t consider yourself to be one of the ‘OB/LW folk’ yourself?
Assuming that in case of success your lifespan is increased by 50 years, and your quality of life is essentially unchanged, then:
For p = 50%, I would consider cryonics a standard life-saving medical procedure, thus I would spend on it as much as it takes as long as I can afford it without impairing my immediate survival.
For p = 5% I would consider cryonics an experimental medical procedure. I would spend on it up to about 1⁄10 − 2⁄10 of my discretionary income.
… Is that an indirect way of saying that you don’t consider yourself to be one of the ‘OB/LW folk’ yourself?
I’m here just for the discussions, I don’t feel any sense of belonging to a community that some people here seem to have.
For p = 0.05% I would doubt that the estimate is actually correct to the fourth significant figure. If I can be assured that it is, then I’d say I’ll spend about 1/1000 (edited) of my discretionary income. If I can’t be assured that the estimate is correct, I’ll spend nothing.
Leading zeros are not considered significant figures when they are placeholders used to express the magnitude of a measure, in cases where the magnitude itself is considered essentially certain.
For instance, if you say that the diameter of a €1 coin is 0.0232 metres, it’s clear that the leading zeros are placeholders, since it was already obvious that the diameter of a €1 coin is less than 0.1 metres. In information-theoretic terms, the leading zeros don’t convey any bit of information.
On the other hand, when you are dealing with estimates where there is uncertainty even on the magnitude, then the leading zeros are significant: If you say that the probability of an event is 0.0005, and it wasn’t already obvious that it was less than 0.001, then the leading zeros do convey information.
Any probability greater than zero can be expressed as a fraction of one: p = 0.0005 = 1/2000, thus transforming leading zeros into trailing zeros, which may be significant figures depending on the case.
Note that, on the other hand, the inverse of physical quantity (other than time/frequency) is not generally an intrinsically meaningful number.
If it’s not too personal a question to ask, what’s the order-of-magnitude of your discretionary income? (Or, if you prefer; does $300/year fall within the range of any of your described spending amounts?)
I would doubt that the estimate is actually correct to the second significant figure
I try to think of probabilities in terms of logarithms these days. 0.05% is roughly −26 decibans of confidence, which might help you look at it in a way that avoids the significant-figure difficulty.
If it’s not too personal a question to ask, what’s the order-of-magnitude of your discretionary income? (Or, if you prefer; does $300/year fall within the range of any of your described spending amounts?)
It falls within the 1⁄10 range, not within the 1/1000 range.
I try to think of probabilities in terms of logarithms these days. 0.05% is roughly −26 decibans of confidence, which might help you look at it in a way that avoids the significant-figure difficulty.
But what is the uncertainty on the probability itself?
I can say that the probability of winning a certain lottery is 1⁄700,000,000. This is a very low probability but its very accurate.
I can also say that probability that space aliens visit me and give me a large sum of money is 1⁄700,000,000, but that’s just a number I made up.
But what is the uncertainty on the probability itself?
Let’s see; in this post is a link to this spreadsheet, which gives various people’s estimates, and, unless you have any better data to use, can serve as an overall initial ‘wisdom of the crowds’ estimate along the lines of a futures prediction market. The predicted odds of success are one in 3, 4, 15, somewhere from 7 to 435, and 1010; for a naive average of 1 in 250, or about 0.4%.
Do you have any reason to believe that you will be able to acquire a more accurate estimate at any time in the near future?
Note that most of these are exactly the kind of made up numbers I was talking about in my previous comment. You can’t start with guesses that show a variance within the first decimal figure and end up with an estimate with a supposed three or four significant figures.
I don’t see much value in these kind of calculations other than the simple realization that cryonics succes is an higly conjunctive event, the more failure modes you consider, the lower the probabilty of succes. Thus, the actual probability is going to be quite low.
Unless someone provides a compelling argument that the probability of success of cryonics is non-negligible, the default position is to reject it. Compare it to other non-evidence-based “medical” procedures such as homeopathy of prayer-based healing.
Compare it to other non-evidence-based “medical” procedures such as homeopathy of prayer-based healing.
Okay—I pay some attention to the skeptical community, such as the podcasts “The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe” and “Skeptoid”. The two items you mention not only have no significant evidence for their efficacy, they have significant quantities of evidence against it, plus additional, even stronger, evidence against their claimed methods of operation. Thus, there is plenty of evidence to tot up, dragging the amount of confidence that anyone should have in those procedures to be in the minus dozens of decibans—say, −70 or below.
The most pessimistic estimate given on that page for successful cryonic revival is around 1/1000, or −30 decibans.
That’s a minimum difference in confidence of 40 decibans—the equivalent of changing your mind from a 50⁄50 chance to 99.99% certainty. Or from 99.99% certainty of falsehood to a 50⁄50 chance. Or, put another way, at least two completely independent studies each with a p-value of 0.01 or better.
My conclusion: there’s very little comparison between cryonics and pseudoscience.
Not exceptionally cheaper compared to the money you will spend on it before you will need it. In any case, you can always subscribe to life insurance naming a relative or a charity as beneficiary and then change the beneficiary if needed.
If you have an accident you can die without having time to sign up.
If you die in a car accident your brain will be most likely heavily damaged by direct trauma and/or ischemia before cryopreservation can be attempted.
DataPacRat obviously believes both Alcor and CI to be credible options.
It’s not obvious from what he wrote. He could be reasoning along the lines of a Pascal’s wager/Pascal’s mugging argument, in which case, he would be incurring in a fallacy.
Not exceptionally cheaper compared to the money you will spend on it before you will need it.
If you have an accident you can die without having time to sign up.
If you die in a car accident your brain will be most likely heavily damaged by direct trauma and/or ischemia before cryopreservation can be attempted.
DataPacRat obviously believes both Alcor and CI to be credible options.
It’s not obvious from what he wrote. He could be reasoning along the lines of a Pascal’s wager/Pascal’s mugging argument, in which case, he would be incurring in a fallacy.
This isn’t exactly the case. CI accepted licensure as a cemetery in 2004 without giving up any of its legal claims, and reached an agreement acknowledging its many differences from traditional cemeteries. And more recently, as you can read here:
In the spirit of de-regulation—and thanks to David Ettinger—the new Republican government of Michigan has decided that CI no longer needs to be regulated as a cemetery. CI can again perfuse patients at the CI facility—as we were able to do before becoming classified as a cemetery in 2004.
Sure, the fact that Ben Best experimented on a patient, ruining his perfusion (Emphasis mine):
Mike Darwin believes they are providing substandard care, certainly not enough to ensure the possibility of revival.
And the fact that they are licensed as a cemetery, and at any time the state can decide that cryonics doesn’t work and thaw everyone.
I am aware of the limitations and flaws of the CI, having read of them, among other places, in the various cryonics posts here at LW. However, I am also aware of the other limitations and flaws of Alcor that have also been posted. Neither organization offers a perfect solution—so I’ve weighed my options, including my physical proximity to CI’s storage facility and my finances, and made my choice. I’ve been hesitating on this for far too long, and at this point, I feel it’s better to simply pick either one rather than not pick one at all.
We need more discussion about forming the best personal strategy for when CI and/or Alcor fail and/or a better organization appears.
Sounds like good fodder for a top-level article.
My current strategy is only useful if a better alternative to CI appears while I’m still alive. I currently plan on avoiding the lifetime membership at CI, instead going for the annual membership; and arranging the insurance so that I’ll be able to stop payments if need be, thus allowing for a relatively clean severance between myself and CI.
One possibility might be to join a group of like-minded individuals, such as the Society for Venturism, who are preparing to help their cryo-preserved members as necessary.
The trouble is as follows:
Any cryonics organization that makes a plausible public pledge to care for the patients of future cryonics orgs that fail suddenly accepts some risk. (Though much of the cost of cryonics is the initial procedure, there would also be transport and secure warehousing costs associated with accepting the patients of a failed org.) This cost is most likely passed on to its current members.
Any cryonics organization that does not make such a pledge can therefore provide cheaper care at a comparable standard, with the added benefit that in the event of failure, the patients of these orgs will be transferred to an org of the first type, should any exist.
One solution, as far as I can tell, is for orgs that wish to be of the first type make a plausible promise to not adopt outside patients, but then make “one-time exceptions” where possible when other orgs fail. (By analogy with Kant’s practice regarding marriage.)
Why are you in such a hurry?
It seems to me that if there are no credible options to extend you lifespan beyond what curent medical science can do, it’s best to just wait for one to show up rather than committing to a weak option with a negligible chance of succeding.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that such a strong option will never materialize during your lifetime, in which case you would just have avoided wasting your money and effort.
From HPMoR, chapter 66, paragraphs 1-4:
I’ve previously looked a bit into cryonics, and flinched at how expensive the full package from Alcor was, especially given my fixed income. I thought something along the lines, “I want to sign up, but there’s no way I can afford that. Maybe if the prices drop before I die.”, and turned my attention to other matters. During my most recent looking into the matter, I looked more thoroughly into the matter. For example, I ran a few online insurance-quote generators, and found that, given my age and non-smoker status, the necessary life-insurance would only run me around $15/month.
If a better option materializes while I’m still alive, then it seems unlikely that my having signed up for cryonics now will prevent me from taking advantage of it. So, by signing up now, I have the advantage of not having cut off my future options, as well as having the cryonics package in case I do kick the bucket before then. If the LW arguments for cryonics add up, then I no longer have any good reason to delay; and, as far as I can tell, they do.
Well, since you are citing Yudkowsky...
That would be useful advice only for an agent with unbounded rationality. A boundedly rational agent like an human can’t possibly plan in advance for every possible contingency.
Hesitation is not necessarily, or even usually, a bad thing: it’s an emotion that warns you against making important decisions without having extensively thought about all the options. Of course, too much hesitation can be crippling.
Yes, but if the option you choose has negligible probability of succeding, then, with overwhelming probability you waste your money. 30 $ per month may not be much money for you, but you could as well spend them in lottery tickets and their expected utility would be in the same ballpark (that is, negligibly greater than zero).
It seems to me that the arguments against outweight the arguments in favor. In particular:
I don’t see this adressed in the arguments in favor.
How inexpensive do you feel signing up for cryonics would have to be, before you considered it worthwhile to pay for?
A precise answer would depend on the probability of success, which I believe to be very low and difficult to estimate precisely, and on the payoff in case of success (some people believe that you wake up as an essentially immortal entity in a post-scarcity world, Robin Hanson believes that you wake up as a brain upload who has to slave his way through a Malthusian society, etc.)
Given the state of the uncertainties involved, my position is that unless someone provides a compelling argument for the probability of cryonics success being non-negligible, then any amount of money spent on it is a bad investment. You should not give in Pascal’s muggings.
Even if they were given it away for free, the effort and social costs may not be not be worth the expected payoff. Think of joining a religion: there is a technically non-zero probability that it will save your soul, but unless you are given evidence that this probability is non-negligible, this is not a good reason for joining, even if it is free.
There might be also social benefits, however. Joining an organized religion signals allegiance and gains you status within the community of its adherents. Likewise, signing up for cryonics signals allegiance and gains you status within the communities where cryonics is popular, mainly the transhumanist/singularitarian groups.
I suspect that the reason cryonics is relatively popular among the OB/LW folks is that Hanson and Yudkowsky strongly endorse it. Siding with the alphas is an easy way to gain status.
Alright—if that’s a datum you need to have before you give an answer, then what would your answer be if the best estimate possible for that probability was 50%? Or 5%? Or 0.05%?
If that’s a datum you need, then in what way would you need that payoff described, measured, and/or estimated before you could give an answer, and for a few plausible payoffs, what would your answer be?
… Is that an indirect way of saying that you don’t consider yourself to be one of the ‘OB/LW folk’ yourself?
Assuming that in case of success your lifespan is increased by 50 years, and your quality of life is essentially unchanged, then:
For p = 50%, I would consider cryonics a standard life-saving medical procedure, thus I would spend on it as much as it takes as long as I can afford it without impairing my immediate survival.
For p = 5% I would consider cryonics an experimental medical procedure. I would spend on it up to about 1⁄10 − 2⁄10 of my discretionary income.
I’m here just for the discussions, I don’t feel any sense of belonging to a community that some people here seem to have.
For p = 0.05% I would doubt that the estimate is actually correct to the fourth significant figure. If I can be assured that it is, then I’d say I’ll spend about 1/1000 (edited) of my discretionary income. If I can’t be assured that the estimate is correct, I’ll spend nothing.
0.05% (i.e. 0.0005) is a number expressed to four decimal places, but only one significant figure.
Leading zeros are not considered significant figures when they are placeholders used to express the magnitude of a measure, in cases where the magnitude itself is considered essentially certain.
For instance, if you say that the diameter of a €1 coin is 0.0232 metres, it’s clear that the leading zeros are placeholders, since it was already obvious that the diameter of a €1 coin is less than 0.1 metres. In information-theoretic terms, the leading zeros don’t convey any bit of information.
On the other hand, when you are dealing with estimates where there is uncertainty even on the magnitude, then the leading zeros are significant: If you say that the probability of an event is 0.0005, and it wasn’t already obvious that it was less than 0.001, then the leading zeros do convey information.
They convey information, but they are not significant figures, which is a term with a specific meaning.
Well, if you have to nitpick...
Any probability greater than zero can be expressed as a fraction of one: p = 0.0005 = 1/2000, thus transforming leading zeros into trailing zeros, which may be significant figures depending on the case.
Note that, on the other hand, the inverse of physical quantity (other than time/frequency) is not generally an intrinsically meaningful number.
If it’s not too personal a question to ask, what’s the order-of-magnitude of your discretionary income? (Or, if you prefer; does $300/year fall within the range of any of your described spending amounts?)
I try to think of probabilities in terms of logarithms these days. 0.05% is roughly −26 decibans of confidence, which might help you look at it in a way that avoids the significant-figure difficulty.
It falls within the 1⁄10 range, not within the 1/1000 range.
But what is the uncertainty on the probability itself?
I can say that the probability of winning a certain lottery is 1⁄700,000,000. This is a very low probability but its very accurate. I can also say that probability that space aliens visit me and give me a large sum of money is 1⁄700,000,000, but that’s just a number I made up.
Let’s see; in this post is a link to this spreadsheet, which gives various people’s estimates, and, unless you have any better data to use, can serve as an overall initial ‘wisdom of the crowds’ estimate along the lines of a futures prediction market. The predicted odds of success are one in 3, 4, 15, somewhere from 7 to 435, and 1010; for a naive average of 1 in 250, or about 0.4%.
Do you have any reason to believe that you will be able to acquire a more accurate estimate at any time in the near future?
Note that most of these are exactly the kind of made up numbers I was talking about in my previous comment. You can’t start with guesses that show a variance within the first decimal figure and end up with an estimate with a supposed three or four significant figures.
I don’t see much value in these kind of calculations other than the simple realization that cryonics succes is an higly conjunctive event, the more failure modes you consider, the lower the probabilty of succes. Thus, the actual probability is going to be quite low.
Unless someone provides a compelling argument that the probability of success of cryonics is non-negligible, the default position is to reject it. Compare it to other non-evidence-based “medical” procedures such as homeopathy of prayer-based healing.
Okay—I pay some attention to the skeptical community, such as the podcasts “The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe” and “Skeptoid”. The two items you mention not only have no significant evidence for their efficacy, they have significant quantities of evidence against it, plus additional, even stronger, evidence against their claimed methods of operation. Thus, there is plenty of evidence to tot up, dragging the amount of confidence that anyone should have in those procedures to be in the minus dozens of decibans—say, −70 or below.
The most pessimistic estimate given on that page for successful cryonic revival is around 1/1000, or −30 decibans.
That’s a minimum difference in confidence of 40 decibans—the equivalent of changing your mind from a 50⁄50 chance to 99.99% certainty. Or from 99.99% certainty of falsehood to a 50⁄50 chance. Or, put another way, at least two completely independent studies each with a p-value of 0.01 or better.
My conclusion: there’s very little comparison between cryonics and pseudoscience.
Life insurance is cheaper when young. If you have an accident you can die without having time to sign up.
If. DataPacRat obviously believes both Alcor and CI to be credible options. Do you wish to make a case against that?
Not exceptionally cheaper compared to the money you will spend on it before you will need it. In any case, you can always subscribe to life insurance naming a relative or a charity as beneficiary and then change the beneficiary if needed.
If you die in a car accident your brain will be most likely heavily damaged by direct trauma and/or ischemia before cryopreservation can be attempted.
It’s not obvious from what he wrote. He could be reasoning along the lines of a Pascal’s wager/Pascal’s mugging argument, in which case, he would be incurring in a fallacy.
Not exceptionally cheaper compared to the money you will spend on it before you will need it.
If you die in a car accident your brain will be most likely heavily damaged by direct trauma and/or ischemia before cryopreservation can be attempted.
It’s not obvious from what he wrote. He could be reasoning along the lines of a Pascal’s wager/Pascal’s mugging argument, in which case, he would be incurring in a fallacy.
(Made a mistake with the forum controls)
This isn’t exactly the case. CI accepted licensure as a cemetery in 2004 without giving up any of its legal claims, and reached an agreement acknowledging its many differences from traditional cemeteries. And more recently, as you can read here: