It would be interesting to see a more thorough analysis of whether the “rational” objections to cryo actually work.
For example, the idea that money is better spent donated to some x-risk org than to your own preservation deserves closer scrutiny. Consider that cryo is cheap ($1 a day) for the young, and that getting cryo to go mainstream would be a strong win as far as existential risk reduction is concerned (because then the public at large would have a reason to care about the future) and as far as rationality is concerned.
Most people already have a reason to care about the future—since it contains their relatives and descendants—and those are among the things that they say they care about.
If you are totally sterile—and have no living relatives—cryonics might seem like a reasonable way of perpetuating your essence—but for most others, there are more conventional options.
Most people already have a reason to care about the future—since it contains their relatives and descendants—and those are among the things that they say they care about.
I think that the reason that people say they care about their childrens’ future but actual interest rates set a concern half-life of 15 years is that people’s far-mode verbalizations do not govern their behavior that much.
Cryo would give people a strong selfish interest in the future, and since psychological time between freezing and revival is zero, discount rates wouldn’t hurt so much.
Let me throw out the figure of 100 years as the kind of timescale of concern that’s required.
Interest rates over the past 20 years have been about 7%, implying that people’s half-life of concern for the future is only about 15 years.
This is plain wrong. Most of these rates is inflation premium (premium for inflation you need to pay is higher than actual inflation because you also bear entire risk if inflation gets higher than predicted, and it cannot really get lower than predicted—it’s not normally distributed).
Inflation-adjusted US treasury bonds have rates like 1.68% a year over last 12 years., and never really got much higher than 3%.
Not to mention that even these figures are suspect. There is no single obvious or objectively correct way to calculate the numbers for inflation-adjustment, and the methods actually used are by no means clear, transparent, and free from political pressures. Ultimately, over a longer period of time, these numbers have little to no coherent meaning in any case.
It is true that you have to adjust for inflation. 1.68% seems low to me. Remember that those bonds may sell at less than their face value, muddying the calculation.
This article quotes 7% above inflation for equity.
It comes out at a rate of 4.79% PA if you reinvest dividends, and 1.6% if you don’t, after adjustment for inflation. If you’re aiming to save efficiently for the future, you would reinvest dividends.
4.79^41 = 6.81
So your discount factor over 41 years is pretty huge. For 82 years that would be a factor of 46, and for 100 years that’s a factor of 107.
And I should add that markets are wickedly anti-inductive. With all the people being prodded into the stock market by tax policies and “finance gurus” … yeah, the risk is being underpriced.
Also, there needs to be a big shift, probably involving a crisis, before risk-free rates actually make up for taxation, inflation, and sovereign risk. After that happens, I’ll be confident the return on capital will be reasonable again.
This is all survivorship bias and nothing more, many other stock exchanges crashed completely
I presume that you mean cases where some violent upheaval caused property right violation, followed by the closing of a relevant exchange?
I agree that this is a significant problem. What is the real survival ratio for exchanges between 1870 and 2010?
However, let us return to the original point: that cryo would make people invest more in the future. Suppose I get a cryo contract and expect to be reanimated 300 years hence. Suppose that I am considering whether to invest in stocks, and I expect 33% of major exchanges to actually return my money if I am reanimated. I split my money between, say, 10 exchanges, and in those that survive, I get 1.05^300 or 2,200,000 times more than I invested—amply making up for exchanges that don’t survive.
So are you saying that the S&P returned 1.0168^41 times more than you invested, if you invested in 1969 and pulled out today? Is there a web app that we can test that on?
Levels of concern about the future vary between individuals—whereas interest rates are a property of society. Surely these things are not connected!
High interest rates do not reflect a lack of concern about the future. They just illustrate how much money your government is printing. Provided you don’t invest in that currency, that matters rather little.
I agree that cryonics would make people care about the future more. Though IMO most of the problems with lack of planning are more to do with the shortcomings of modern political systems than they are to do with voters not caring about the future.
The problem with cryonics is the cost. You might care more, but you can influence less—because you no longer have the cryonics money. If you can’t think of any more worthwhile things to spend your money on, go for it.
Real interest rates should be fairly constant (nominal interest rates will of course change with inflation), and reflect the price the marginal saver needs to postpone consumption, and the highest price the marginal borrower will pay to bring his forward. If everyone had very low discount rates, you wouldn’t need to offer savers so much, and borrowers would consider the costs more prohibitive, so rates would fall.
They’re nothing of the kind. See this. Inflation-adjusted as-risk-free-as-it-gets rates vary between 0.2%/year to 3.4%/year.
This isn’t about discount rates, it’s about supply and demand of investment money, and financial sector essentially erases any connection with people’s discount rates.
Perhaps decide to use gold, then. Your society’s interest rate then becomes irrelevant to you—and you are free to care about the future as much—or as little—as you like.
Interest rates just do not reflect people’s level of concern about the future. Your money might be worth a lot less in 50 years—but the same is not necessarily true of your investments. So—despite all the discussion of interest rates—the topic is an irrelevant digression, apparently introduced through fallacious reasoning.
Good point: mainstream cryonics would be a big step towards raising the sanity waterline, which may end up being a prerequisite to reducing various kinds of existential risk. However, I think that the causal relationship goes the other way, and that raising the sanity waterline comes first, and cryonics second: if you can get the average person across the inferential distance to seeing cryonics as reasonable, you can most likely get them across the inferential distance to seeing existential risk as really flippin’ important. (I should take the advice of my own post here and note that I am sure there are really strong arguments against the idea that working to reduce existential risk is important, or at least against having much certainty that reducing existential risk will have been the correct thing to do upon reflection, at the very least on a personal level.) Nonetheless, I agree further analysis is necessary, though difficult.
that raising the sanity waterline comes first, and cryonics second:
But how do we know that’s the way it will pan out? Raising the sanity waterline is HARD. SUPER-DUPER HARD. Like, you probably couldn’t make much of a dent even if you had a cool $10 million in your pocket.
An alternative scenario is that cryonics gets popular without any “increases in general sanity”, for example because the LW/OB communities give the cryo companies a huge increase in sales and a larger flow of philanthropy, which allows them to employ a marketing consultancy to market cryo to market cryonics to exactly the demographic who are already signing up, where additional signups come not from increased population sanity, but from just marketing cryo so that 20% of those who are sane enough to sign up hear about it, rather than 1%.
I claim that your $10M would be able to increase cryo signup by a factor of 20, but probably not dent sanity.
Your original point was that “getting cryo to go mainstream would be a strong win as far as existential risk reduction is concerned (because then the public at large would have a reason to care about the future) and as far as rationality is concerned”, in which case your above comment is interesting, but tangential to what we were discussing previously. I agree that getting people to sign up for cryonics will almost assuredly get more people to sign up for cryonics (barring legal issues becoming more salient and thus potentially more restrictive as cryonics becomes more popular, or bad stories publicized whether true or false), but “because then the public at large would have a reason to care about the future” does not seem to be a strong reason to expect existential risk reduction as a result (one counterargument being the one raised by timtyler in this thread). You have to connect cryonics with existential risk reduction, and the key isn’t futurism, but strong epistemic rationality. Sure, you could also get interest sparked via memetics, but I don’t think the most cost-effective way to do so would be investment in cryonics as opposed to, say, billboards proclaiming ‘Existential risks are even more bad than marijuana: talk to your kids.’ Again, my intuitions are totally uncertain about this point, but it seems to me that the option a) 10 million dollars → cryonics investment → increased awareness in futurism → increased awareness in existential risk reduction, is most likely inferior to option b) 10 million dollars → any other memetic strategy → increased awareness in existential risk reduction.
a) 10 million dollars → cryonics investment → increased awareness in futurism → increased awareness in existential risk reduction, is most likely inferior to option b) 10 million dollars → any other memetic strategy → increased awareness in existential risk reduction.
It is true that there are probably better ways out there to reduce x-risk than via cryo, i.e. the first $10M you have should go into other stuff, so the argument would carry for a strict altruist to not get cryo.
However, the fact that cryo is both cheap and useful in and of itself means that the degree of self-sacrificingness required to decide against it is pretty high.
For example, your $1 a day on cryo provides the following benefits to x-risk:
potentially increased personal commitment from you
network effects causing others to be more likely to sign up and therefore not die and potentially be more concerned and committed
revenue and increased numbers/credibility for cyro companies
potentially increased rationality because you expect more to actually experience the future
Now you could sacrifice your $1 a day and get more x-risk reduction by spending it on direct x-risk efforts (in addition to the existing time and money you are putting that way), BUT if you;re going to do that, then why not sacrifice another marginal $1 a day of food/entertainment money?
Benton house has not yet reached the level of eating the very cheapest possible food and doesn’t yet spend $0 per person per day on luxuries.
And if you continue to spend more than $1 a day on food and luxuries, do you really value your life at less than one Hershey bar a day?
I think that there is another explanation: people are using extreme altruism as a cover for their own irrationality, and if a situation came up where they could either contribute net +$9000 (cost of cryo) to x-risk right now but die OR not die, they would choose to not die. In fact, I believe that a LW commenter has worked out how to sacrifice your life for a gain of a whole $1,000,000 to x-risk using life insurance and suicide. As far as I know, people who don’t sign up for cryo for altruistic reasons are not exactly flocking to this option.
(EDIT: I’ll note that this comment does constitute a changing argument in response to the fact that Will’s counterargument quoted at the top defeats the argument I was pursuing before)
And if you continue to spend more than $1 a day on food and luxuries, do you really value your life at less than one Hershey bar a day?
I think the correct question here is instead “Do you really value a very, very small chance at you having been signed up for cryonics leading to huge changes in your expected utility in some distant future across unfathomable multiverses more than an assured small amount of utility 30 minutes from now?” I do not think the answer is obvious, but I lean towards avoiding long-term commitments until I better understand the issues. Yes, a very very very tiny amount of me is dying everyday due to freak kitchen accidents, but that much of my measure is so seemingly negligible that I don’t feel too horrible trading it off for more thinking time and half a Hershey’s bar.
The reasons you gave for spending a dollar a day on cryonics seem perfectly reasonable and I have spent a considerable amount of time thinking about them. Nonetheless, I have yet to be convinced that I would want to sign up for cryonics as anything more than a credible signal of extreme rationality. From a purely intuitive standpoint this seems justified. I’m 18 years old and the singularity seems near. I have measure to burn.
Perhaps. I think a singularity is more likely to occur before I die (in most universes, anyway). With advancing life extension technology, good genes, and a disposition to be reasonably careful with my life, I plan on living pretty much indefinitely. I doubt cryonics has any effect at all on these universes for me personally. Beyond that, I do not have a strong sense of identity, and my preferences are not mostly about personal gain, and so universes where I do die do not seem horribly tragic, especially if I can write down a list of my values for future generations (or a future FAI) to consider and do with that they wish.
So basically… (far) less than a 1% chance of saving ‘me’, but even then, I don’t have strong preferences for being saved. I think that the technologies are totally feasible and am less pessimistic than others that Alcor and CI will survive for the next few decades and do well. However, I think larger considerations like life extension technology, uFAI or FAI, MNT, bioweaponry, et cetera, simply render the cryopreservation / no cryopreservation question both difficult and insignificant for me personally. (Again, I’m 18, these arguments do not hold equally well for people who are older than me.)
a disposition to be reasonably careful with my life
When I read this, two images popped unbidden into my mind: 1) you wanting to walk over the not-that-stable log over the stream with the jagged rocks in it and 2) you wanting to climb out on the ledge at Benton House to get the ball. I suppose one person’s “reasonably careful” is another person’s “needlessly risky.”
This comment inspired me to draft a post about how much quantum measure is lost doing various things, so that people can more easily see whether or not a certain activity (like driving to the store for food once a week instead of having it delivered) is ‘worth it’.
Ha, good times. :) But being careful with one’s life and being careful with one’s limb are too very different things. I may be stupid, but I’m not stupid.
Unless you’re wearing a helmet, moderate falls that 99+% of the time just result in a few sprains/breaks, may <1% of the time give permanent brain damage (mostly I’m thinking of hard objects’ edges striking the head). Maybe my estimation is skewed by fictional evidence.
So a 1 in a 100 chance of falling and a roughly 1 in a 1,000 chance of brain damage conditional on that (I’d be really surprised if it was higher than that; biased reporting and what not) is about a 1 in 100,000 chance of severe brain damage. I have put myself in such situations roughly… 10 times in my life. I think car accidents when constantly driving between SFO and Silicon Valley are a more likely cause of death, but I don’t have the statistics on hand.
[It is perfectly OK for you to endorse the position of not caring much about yourself whilst still acknowledging the objective facts about cryo, even if they seem to imply that cryo could be used relatively effectively to save you … facts =! values …]
Hm, thanks for making me really think about it, and not letting me slide by without doing calculation. It seems to me, given my preferences, about which I am not logically omniscient, and given my structural uncertainty around these issues, of which there is much, I think that my 50 percent confidence interval is between .00001%, 1 in 10 million, to .01%, 1 in ten thousand.
Oh, should they? I’m the first to admit that I sorely lack in knowledge of probability theory. I thought it was better to give a distribution here to indicate my level of uncertainty as well as my best guess (precision as well as accuracy).
Contra Roko, it’s OK for a Bayesian to talk in terms of a probability distribution on the probability of an event. (However, Roko is right that in decision problems, the mean value of that probability distribution is quite an important thing.)
This would be true if you were estimating the value of a real-world parameter like the length of a rod. However, for a probability, you just give a single number, which is representative of the odds you would bet at. If you have several conflicting intuitions about what that number should be, form a weighted average of them, weighted by how much you trust each intuition or method for getting the number.
For small probabilities, the weighted average calculation is dominated by the high-probability possibilities—if your 50% confidence interval was up to 1 in 10,000, then 25% of the probability probability mass is to the right of 1 in 10,000, so you can’t say anything less than (0.75)x0 + (0.25)x1 in 10000 = 1 in 40,000.
I wasn’t using a normal distribution in my original formulation, though: the mean of the picture in my head was around 1 in a million with a longer tail to the right (towards 100%) and a shorter tail to the left (towards 0%) (on a log scale?). It could be that I was doing something stupid by making one tail longer than the other?
It would only be suspicious if your resulting probability were a sum of very many independent, similarly probable alternatives (such sums do look normal even if the individual alternatives aren’t).
It seems to me, given my preferences, about which I am not logically omniscient, [...]
I’d say your preference can’t possibly influence the probability of this event. To clear up the air, can you explain how does taking into account your preference influence the estimate? Better, how does the estimate break up on the different defeaters (events making the positive outcome impossible)?
Sorry, I should have been more clear: my preferences influence the possible interpretations of the word ‘save’. I wouldn’t consider surviving indefinitely but without my preferences being systematically fulfilled ‘saved’, for instance; more like damned.
It’s cheap because you will not actually die in the near future. ETA: though it sounds as if you’re paying mostly to be allowed to keep having cheap life insurance in the future?
It would be interesting to see a more thorough analysis of whether the “rational” objections to cryo actually work.
For example, the idea that money is better spent donated to some x-risk org than to your own preservation deserves closer scrutiny. Consider that cryo is cheap ($1 a day) for the young, and that getting cryo to go mainstream would be a strong win as far as existential risk reduction is concerned (because then the public at large would have a reason to care about the future) and as far as rationality is concerned.
Most people already have a reason to care about the future—since it contains their relatives and descendants—and those are among the things that they say they care about.
If you are totally sterile—and have no living relatives—cryonics might seem like a reasonable way of perpetuating your essence—but for most others, there are more conventional options.
Interest rates over the past 20 years have been about 7%, implying that people’s half-life of concern for the future is only about 15 years.
I think that the reason that people say they care about their childrens’ future but actual interest rates set a concern half-life of 15 years is that people’s far-mode verbalizations do not govern their behavior that much.
Cryo would give people a strong selfish interest in the future, and since psychological time between freezing and revival is zero, discount rates wouldn’t hurt so much.
Let me throw out the figure of 100 years as the kind of timescale of concern that’s required.
This is plain wrong. Most of these rates is inflation premium (premium for inflation you need to pay is higher than actual inflation because you also bear entire risk if inflation gets higher than predicted, and it cannot really get lower than predicted—it’s not normally distributed).
Inflation-adjusted US treasury bonds have rates like 1.68% a year over last 12 years., and never really got much higher than 3%.
For most interest rates like the UK ones you quote there’s non-negligible currency exchange risk and default risk in addition to all that.
taw:
Not to mention that even these figures are suspect. There is no single obvious or objectively correct way to calculate the numbers for inflation-adjustment, and the methods actually used are by no means clear, transparent, and free from political pressures. Ultimately, over a longer period of time, these numbers have little to no coherent meaning in any case.
It is true that you have to adjust for inflation. 1.68% seems low to me. Remember that those bonds may sell at less than their face value, muddying the calculation.
This article quotes 7% above inflation for equity.
It seems low but it’s correct. Risk-free interests rate are very very low.
Individual stocks carry very high risk, so this is nowhere near correct calculation.
And even if you want to invest in S&P index—notice the date − 2007. This is a typical survivorship bias article from that time. In many countries stock markets crashed hard, and failed to rise for decades. Not just tiny countries, huge economies like Japan too. And by 2010 the same is true about United States too (and it would be ever worse if it wasn’t for de facto massive taxpayers subsidies)
Here’s Wikipedia:
Empirically, over the past 40 years (1969–2009), there has been no significant equity premium in (US) stocks.
This wasn’t true back in 2007.
Actually, yes, there is such a web app
It comes out at a rate of 4.79% PA if you reinvest dividends, and 1.6% if you don’t, after adjustment for inflation. If you’re aiming to save efficiently for the future, you would reinvest dividends.
4.79^41 = 6.81
So your discount factor over 41 years is pretty huge. For 82 years that would be a factor of 46, and for 100 years that’s a factor of 107.
This is all survivorship bias and nothing more, many other stock exchanges crashed completely or had much lower returns like Japanese.
And I should add that markets are wickedly anti-inductive. With all the people being prodded into the stock market by tax policies and “finance gurus” … yeah, the risk is being underpriced.
Also, there needs to be a big shift, probably involving a crisis, before risk-free rates actually make up for taxation, inflation, and sovereign risk. After that happens, I’ll be confident the return on capital will be reasonable again.
I presume that you mean cases where some violent upheaval caused property right violation, followed by the closing of a relevant exchange?
I agree that this is a significant problem. What is the real survival ratio for exchanges between 1870 and 2010?
However, let us return to the original point: that cryo would make people invest more in the future. Suppose I get a cryo contract and expect to be reanimated 300 years hence. Suppose that I am considering whether to invest in stocks, and I expect 33% of major exchanges to actually return my money if I am reanimated. I split my money between, say, 10 exchanges, and in those that survive, I get 1.05^300 or 2,200,000 times more than I invested—amply making up for exchanges that don’t survive.
So are you saying that the S&P returned 1.0168^41 times more than you invested, if you invested in 1969 and pulled out today? Is there a web app that we can test that on?
Levels of concern about the future vary between individuals—whereas interest rates are a property of society. Surely these things are not connected!
High interest rates do not reflect a lack of concern about the future. They just illustrate how much money your government is printing. Provided you don’t invest in that currency, that matters rather little.
I agree that cryonics would make people care about the future more. Though IMO most of the problems with lack of planning are more to do with the shortcomings of modern political systems than they are to do with voters not caring about the future.
The problem with cryonics is the cost. You might care more, but you can influence less—because you no longer have the cryonics money. If you can’t think of any more worthwhile things to spend your money on, go for it.
Real interest rates should be fairly constant (nominal interest rates will of course change with inflation), and reflect the price the marginal saver needs to postpone consumption, and the highest price the marginal borrower will pay to bring his forward. If everyone had very low discount rates, you wouldn’t need to offer savers so much, and borrowers would consider the costs more prohibitive, so rates would fall.
They’re nothing of the kind. See this. Inflation-adjusted as-risk-free-as-it-gets rates vary between 0.2%/year to 3.4%/year.
This isn’t about discount rates, it’s about supply and demand of investment money, and financial sector essentially erases any connection with people’s discount rates.
Point taken; I concede the point. Evidently saving/borrowing rates are sticky, or low enough to be not relevant.
Perhaps decide to use gold, then. Your society’s interest rate then becomes irrelevant to you—and you are free to care about the future as much—or as little—as you like.
Interest rates just do not reflect people’s level of concern about the future. Your money might be worth a lot less in 50 years—but the same is not necessarily true of your investments. So—despite all the discussion of interest rates—the topic is an irrelevant digression, apparently introduced through fallacious reasoning.
Good point: mainstream cryonics would be a big step towards raising the sanity waterline, which may end up being a prerequisite to reducing various kinds of existential risk. However, I think that the causal relationship goes the other way, and that raising the sanity waterline comes first, and cryonics second: if you can get the average person across the inferential distance to seeing cryonics as reasonable, you can most likely get them across the inferential distance to seeing existential risk as really flippin’ important. (I should take the advice of my own post here and note that I am sure there are really strong arguments against the idea that working to reduce existential risk is important, or at least against having much certainty that reducing existential risk will have been the correct thing to do upon reflection, at the very least on a personal level.) Nonetheless, I agree further analysis is necessary, though difficult.
But how do we know that’s the way it will pan out? Raising the sanity waterline is HARD. SUPER-DUPER HARD. Like, you probably couldn’t make much of a dent even if you had a cool $10 million in your pocket.
An alternative scenario is that cryonics gets popular without any “increases in general sanity”, for example because the LW/OB communities give the cryo companies a huge increase in sales and a larger flow of philanthropy, which allows them to employ a marketing consultancy to market cryo to market cryonics to exactly the demographic who are already signing up, where additional signups come not from increased population sanity, but from just marketing cryo so that 20% of those who are sane enough to sign up hear about it, rather than 1%.
I claim that your $10M would be able to increase cryo signup by a factor of 20, but probably not dent sanity.
Your original point was that “getting cryo to go mainstream would be a strong win as far as existential risk reduction is concerned (because then the public at large would have a reason to care about the future) and as far as rationality is concerned”, in which case your above comment is interesting, but tangential to what we were discussing previously. I agree that getting people to sign up for cryonics will almost assuredly get more people to sign up for cryonics (barring legal issues becoming more salient and thus potentially more restrictive as cryonics becomes more popular, or bad stories publicized whether true or false), but “because then the public at large would have a reason to care about the future” does not seem to be a strong reason to expect existential risk reduction as a result (one counterargument being the one raised by timtyler in this thread). You have to connect cryonics with existential risk reduction, and the key isn’t futurism, but strong epistemic rationality. Sure, you could also get interest sparked via memetics, but I don’t think the most cost-effective way to do so would be investment in cryonics as opposed to, say, billboards proclaiming ‘Existential risks are even more bad than marijuana: talk to your kids.’ Again, my intuitions are totally uncertain about this point, but it seems to me that the option a) 10 million dollars → cryonics investment → increased awareness in futurism → increased awareness in existential risk reduction, is most likely inferior to option b) 10 million dollars → any other memetic strategy → increased awareness in existential risk reduction.
It is true that there are probably better ways out there to reduce x-risk than via cryo, i.e. the first $10M you have should go into other stuff, so the argument would carry for a strict altruist to not get cryo.
However, the fact that cryo is both cheap and useful in and of itself means that the degree of self-sacrificingness required to decide against it is pretty high.
For example, your $1 a day on cryo provides the following benefits to x-risk:
potentially increased personal commitment from you
network effects causing others to be more likely to sign up and therefore not die and potentially be more concerned and committed
revenue and increased numbers/credibility for cyro companies
potentially increased rationality because you expect more to actually experience the future
Now you could sacrifice your $1 a day and get more x-risk reduction by spending it on direct x-risk efforts (in addition to the existing time and money you are putting that way), BUT if you;re going to do that, then why not sacrifice another marginal $1 a day of food/entertainment money?
Benton house has not yet reached the level of eating the very cheapest possible food and doesn’t yet spend $0 per person per day on luxuries.
And if you continue to spend more than $1 a day on food and luxuries, do you really value your life at less than one Hershey bar a day?
I think that there is another explanation: people are using extreme altruism as a cover for their own irrationality, and if a situation came up where they could either contribute net +$9000 (cost of cryo) to x-risk right now but die OR not die, they would choose to not die. In fact, I believe that a LW commenter has worked out how to sacrifice your life for a gain of a whole $1,000,000 to x-risk using life insurance and suicide. As far as I know, people who don’t sign up for cryo for altruistic reasons are not exactly flocking to this option.
(EDIT: I’ll note that this comment does constitute a changing argument in response to the fact that Will’s counterargument quoted at the top defeats the argument I was pursuing before)
I think the correct question here is instead “Do you really value a very, very small chance at you having been signed up for cryonics leading to huge changes in your expected utility in some distant future across unfathomable multiverses more than an assured small amount of utility 30 minutes from now?” I do not think the answer is obvious, but I lean towards avoiding long-term commitments until I better understand the issues. Yes, a very very very tiny amount of me is dying everyday due to freak kitchen accidents, but that much of my measure is so seemingly negligible that I don’t feel too horrible trading it off for more thinking time and half a Hershey’s bar.
The reasons you gave for spending a dollar a day on cryonics seem perfectly reasonable and I have spent a considerable amount of time thinking about them. Nonetheless, I have yet to be convinced that I would want to sign up for cryonics as anything more than a credible signal of extreme rationality. From a purely intuitive standpoint this seems justified. I’m 18 years old and the singularity seems near. I have measure to burn.
Can you give me a number? Maybe we disagree because of differing probability estimates that cryo will save you.
Perhaps. I think a singularity is more likely to occur before I die (in most universes, anyway). With advancing life extension technology, good genes, and a disposition to be reasonably careful with my life, I plan on living pretty much indefinitely. I doubt cryonics has any effect at all on these universes for me personally. Beyond that, I do not have a strong sense of identity, and my preferences are not mostly about personal gain, and so universes where I do die do not seem horribly tragic, especially if I can write down a list of my values for future generations (or a future FAI) to consider and do with that they wish.
So basically… (far) less than a 1% chance of saving ‘me’, but even then, I don’t have strong preferences for being saved. I think that the technologies are totally feasible and am less pessimistic than others that Alcor and CI will survive for the next few decades and do well. However, I think larger considerations like life extension technology, uFAI or FAI, MNT, bioweaponry, et cetera, simply render the cryopreservation / no cryopreservation question both difficult and insignificant for me personally. (Again, I’m 18, these arguments do not hold equally well for people who are older than me.)
When I read this, two images popped unbidden into my mind: 1) you wanting to walk over the not-that-stable log over the stream with the jagged rocks in it and 2) you wanting to climb out on the ledge at Benton House to get the ball. I suppose one person’s “reasonably careful” is another person’s “needlessly risky.”
This comment inspired me to draft a post about how much quantum measure is lost doing various things, so that people can more easily see whether or not a certain activity (like driving to the store for food once a week instead of having it delivered) is ‘worth it’.
Ha, good times. :) But being careful with one’s life and being careful with one’s limb are too very different things. I may be stupid, but I’m not stupid.
Unless you’re wearing a helmet, moderate falls that 99+% of the time just result in a few sprains/breaks, may <1% of the time give permanent brain damage (mostly I’m thinking of hard objects’ edges striking the head). Maybe my estimation is skewed by fictional evidence.
So a 1 in a 100 chance of falling and a roughly 1 in a 1,000 chance of brain damage conditional on that (I’d be really surprised if it was higher than that; biased reporting and what not) is about a 1 in 100,000 chance of severe brain damage. I have put myself in such situations roughly… 10 times in my life. I think car accidents when constantly driving between SFO and Silicon Valley are a more likely cause of death, but I don’t have the statistics on hand.
Good point about car risks. Sadly, I was considerably less cautious when I was younger—when I had more to lose. I imagine this is often the case.
How much far less? 0? 10^-1000?
[It is perfectly OK for you to endorse the position of not caring much about yourself whilst still acknowledging the objective facts about cryo, even if they seem to imply that cryo could be used relatively effectively to save you … facts =! values …]
Hm, thanks for making me really think about it, and not letting me slide by without doing calculation. It seems to me, given my preferences, about which I am not logically omniscient, and given my structural uncertainty around these issues, of which there is much, I think that my 50 percent confidence interval is between .00001%, 1 in 10 million, to .01%, 1 in ten thousand.
shouldn’t probabilities just be numbers?
i.e. just integrate over the probability distribution of what you think the probability is.
Oh, should they? I’m the first to admit that I sorely lack in knowledge of probability theory. I thought it was better to give a distribution here to indicate my level of uncertainty as well as my best guess (precision as well as accuracy).
Contra Roko, it’s OK for a Bayesian to talk in terms of a probability distribution on the probability of an event. (However, Roko is right that in decision problems, the mean value of that probability distribution is quite an important thing.)
This would be true if you were estimating the value of a real-world parameter like the length of a rod. However, for a probability, you just give a single number, which is representative of the odds you would bet at. If you have several conflicting intuitions about what that number should be, form a weighted average of them, weighted by how much you trust each intuition or method for getting the number.
Ahhh, makes sense, thanks. In that case I’d put my best guess at around 1 in a million.
For small probabilities, the weighted average calculation is dominated by the high-probability possibilities—if your 50% confidence interval was up to 1 in 10,000, then 25% of the probability probability mass is to the right of 1 in 10,000, so you can’t say anything less than (0.75)x0 + (0.25)x1 in 10000 = 1 in 40,000.
I wasn’t using a normal distribution in my original formulation, though: the mean of the picture in my head was around 1 in a million with a longer tail to the right (towards 100%) and a shorter tail to the left (towards 0%) (on a log scale?). It could be that I was doing something stupid by making one tail longer than the other?
It would only be suspicious if your resulting probability were a sum of very many independent, similarly probable alternatives (such sums do look normal even if the individual alternatives aren’t).
I’d say your preference can’t possibly influence the probability of this event. To clear up the air, can you explain how does taking into account your preference influence the estimate? Better, how does the estimate break up on the different defeaters (events making the positive outcome impossible)?
Sorry, I should have been more clear: my preferences influence the possible interpretations of the word ‘save’. I wouldn’t consider surviving indefinitely but without my preferences being systematically fulfilled ‘saved’, for instance; more like damned.
I like this turn of phrase.
It’s cheap because you will not actually die in the near future. ETA: though it sounds as if you’re paying mostly to be allowed to keep having cheap life insurance in the future?