Life insurance is insurance, a way of paying extra to deal with expensive events that have a low probability of occurring, to give you a high probability of (financially) surviving it. Paying that amount extra in case of something that is nearly guaranteed to happen, and gives you a small chance of getting past it, seems the exact opposite of the case where insurance makes sense.
I don’t follow. The point is that (1) you don’t know when you’re going to die, it could be tomorrow and it could be in 30 years, and (2) you don’t have $150,000 lying around right now, or at any given time between now and 100 years from now, to pay for your preservation if you happen to die. If, for example, you get a so-called “universal life” policy, you pay in to a sort of savings account for some decades; after some point it’s just money, I think, and until that point it’s worth $150,000 (or whatever you’re paying for) if you die. It’s like you’re “leasing money that you only get if you die”, so that like a lease you get to have the thing the whole time, not just after you’ve saved up the money.
I’m aware that this is a thing that people do. I expect that people doing it have very much (at least order-of-magnitude) greater confidence that the process will work, since the probability thresholds to make cryonic-funded-by-insurance worthwhile are substantially greater than for cryonic-funded-by-investments unless capacity for investment is negligible and the insurance is very cheap.
That is, it’s really only for people in their 20′s who don’t have much income and yet want to pay ten thousand dollars or so to reduce the probability of dying permanently in the next decade by something like 0.0005. Every decade in which they don’t build up enough to pay for it outright, they’re on a losing treadmill because the premiums typically more than double per decade of age, and on top of that they have been forgoing investment growth with that money the whole time.
>Every decade in which they don’t build up enough to pay for it outright, they’re on a losing treadmill because the premiums typically more than double per decade of age,
Some universal life insurance policies are fixed premium. But yeah, this mainly helps if you get it when you’re younger.
>reduce the probability of dying permanently in the next decade by something like 0.0005
We can condition on being healthy, not taking big risks, not committing suicide; I’m not sure how much that is. Your estimates suggest it’s less by a factor of 15 or so, if probability of cryonics working is 50%. Eyeballing causes of death https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/usa-cause-of-death-by-age-and-gender this seems implausible, a factor of say 3 seems plausible, though maybe dying to homicide and car accidents is much more controllable than I’m assuming.
What you are describing is covered by the condition at the start of my post: “very much (at least order-of-magnitude) greater confidence that the process will work”.
My calculation is based on the minimum probability that it will work for it to be worthwhile for me, which is around 5% chance of success.
I’m saying that people in their 20s who have at least order of magnitude greater confidence than you that cryonics will work, don’t need to care at the level of 0.0005, just at the level of 0.003, which is much greater. This seems in conflict with what you wrote.
Life insurance is insurance, a way of paying extra to deal with expensive events that have a low probability of occurring, to give you a high probability of (financially) surviving it. Paying that amount extra in case of something that is nearly guaranteed to happen, and gives you a small chance of getting past it, seems the exact opposite of the case where insurance makes sense.
I don’t follow. The point is that (1) you don’t know when you’re going to die, it could be tomorrow and it could be in 30 years, and (2) you don’t have $150,000 lying around right now, or at any given time between now and 100 years from now, to pay for your preservation if you happen to die. If, for example, you get a so-called “universal life” policy, you pay in to a sort of savings account for some decades; after some point it’s just money, I think, and until that point it’s worth $150,000 (or whatever you’re paying for) if you die. It’s like you’re “leasing money that you only get if you die”, so that like a lease you get to have the thing the whole time, not just after you’ve saved up the money.
(This is a normal thing that people do to fund cryonic suspension: https://www.cryonics.org/resources/life-insurance )
I’m aware that this is a thing that people do. I expect that people doing it have very much (at least order-of-magnitude) greater confidence that the process will work, since the probability thresholds to make cryonic-funded-by-insurance worthwhile are substantially greater than for cryonic-funded-by-investments unless capacity for investment is negligible and the insurance is very cheap.
That is, it’s really only for people in their 20′s who don’t have much income and yet want to pay ten thousand dollars or so to reduce the probability of dying permanently in the next decade by something like 0.0005. Every decade in which they don’t build up enough to pay for it outright, they’re on a losing treadmill because the premiums typically more than double per decade of age, and on top of that they have been forgoing investment growth with that money the whole time.
>Every decade in which they don’t build up enough to pay for it outright, they’re on a losing treadmill because the premiums typically more than double per decade of age,
Some universal life insurance policies are fixed premium. But yeah, this mainly helps if you get it when you’re younger.
>reduce the probability of dying permanently in the next decade by something like 0.0005
A male in the US age 20-30 has about 0.015 chance of dying in that time period; a female half that. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
We can condition on being healthy, not taking big risks, not committing suicide; I’m not sure how much that is. Your estimates suggest it’s less by a factor of 15 or so, if probability of cryonics working is 50%. Eyeballing causes of death https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/usa-cause-of-death-by-age-and-gender this seems implausible, a factor of say 3 seems plausible, though maybe dying to homicide and car accidents is much more controllable than I’m assuming.
What you are describing is covered by the condition at the start of my post: “very much (at least order-of-magnitude) greater confidence that the process will work”.
My calculation is based on the minimum probability that it will work for it to be worthwhile for me, which is around 5% chance of success.
I’m saying that people in their 20s who have at least order of magnitude greater confidence than you that cryonics will work, don’t need to care at the level of 0.0005, just at the level of 0.003, which is much greater. This seems in conflict with what you wrote.
If you prefer, mentally insert an “otherwise, …” after the first paragraph.