While it does seem worthwhile from a purely selfish point of view, $150k+ for a small chance of revival (my estimate: no more than 2%) seems expensive from the point of view of things that money can buy to promote the future welfare of people I care about.
At what probability, roughly, would it start to be appealing? Is it more like, say, 5%, 15%, or 50%?
What are the main points of failure that you anticipate in plan? E.g. do you think the preservation technique is probably insufficient; brain emulation or nanotech or etc. won’t be feasible; human society won’t make it to a transhumanist world; people in the future won’t care enough; or what?
If I could be confident of 5%, it would be attractive right now. The problem isn’t really any single point of failure, the problem is that there are way too many points of failure that all have pretty good chances of happening, any single one of which dooms all or most of the clients. Even so, if I had substantially more assets then it would be attractive even at 0-2%.
Most of the points of failure seem like things that could be averted by a small group of people who care about the patients not thawing. Usually when people care about something it is at least feasible, if not inevitable, that all the avertable failures are actually averted. Rocket launches, for example, have at least hundreds of points of potential failure. It sounds like your reasoning would imply that rocket launches could never ever happen. In other words, I’m saying, the points of failure seem pretty correlated with each other, with shared factors being “civilization doesn’t fall apart” and “there’s people with resources who care about the patients”.
Is your 5% here an actual probability estimate (e.g., you have experience making probability estimates that you get feedback on and followed a similar process in this case; or, you’d make a bet against someone who said “20% probability” or on the other side “1% probability” if it were easy to have the bet resolved), or is it more an impressionistic nonquantitative statement of your sense of the plausibility of cryonics working? I ask because maybe the meta-question here is less “what specifically is JBlack’s expected utility calculation and where might there be important flaws, if any”, and more “how is JBlack dealing with decision making for nebulous questions like cryonics”.
I have in fact looked into cryonics as a possible life-extension mechanism, looked at a bunch of the possible failure modes, and many of these cannot be reliably averted by a group of well-meaning people. If you’re actually trying to model “people who are not currently investing in cryonic preservation”, then it does little good to post hypotheses such as “they are too scared of false hope”. Maybe some are, but certainly not all.
Also yes, my threshold around 5% is where I have calculated that it would be “worth it to me”, and my upper bound (not estimate) of 2% is based on some weeks of investigation of cryonic technology, the social context in which it occurs, and expectations for the next 50 years. If there have been any exciting revolutions in the past ten years that significantly alter these numbers, I haven’t seen them mentioned anywhere (including company websites and sites like this).
As far as bets go, I am literally staking my life on this estimate, am I not?
>then it does little good to post hypotheses such as “they are too scared of false hope”
What would you recommend? I spend time talking to such people, but I’m just one person and I wish there were more theory about this. I’m surprised LW isn’t interested.
>Maybe some are, but certainly not all.
What do view as the main factors?
>many of these cannot be reliably averted by a group of well-meaning people
Which ones are you thinking of? Some that I’m worried about:
-- forceful intervention (e.g. by a state or invader) that prevents people from putting LN in the dewars
-- collapse of civilization, such that it’s too expensive to produce LN and even people who care a lot can’t rig something together (have you looked into this? do you know under what circumstances this might happen?)
-- X-risk, e.g. AGI risk, killing everyone (in particular, preventing humanity from developing nanotech etc.)
> investigation of cryonic technology, the social context in which it occurs, and expectations for the next 50 years
Which seem like key points of failure? You said there’s lots of points of failure, but this doesn’t give an estimate, if we expand conjunctions we have to also expand disjunctions. For example, I could be worried that I might die in a way that makes my cryo-preservation worse—I’m left dead for a few days, there’s physical trauma to my brain, etc. This does decrease the probability of success, but also we have to factor in uncertainty about how good preservation needs to be; it’s not just P(perfect preservation)xP(humanity makes it to nanotech), it’s also additionally P(bad preservation)xP(nanotech)xP(souls can be well reconstructed from bad preservations).
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.
While it does seem worthwhile from a purely selfish point of view, $150k+ for a small chance of revival (my estimate: no more than 2%) seems expensive from the point of view of things that money can buy to promote the future welfare of people I care about.
At what probability, roughly, would it start to be appealing? Is it more like, say, 5%, 15%, or 50%?
What are the main points of failure that you anticipate in plan? E.g. do you think the preservation technique is probably insufficient; brain emulation or nanotech or etc. won’t be feasible; human society won’t make it to a transhumanist world; people in the future won’t care enough; or what?
If I could be confident of 5%, it would be attractive right now. The problem isn’t really any single point of failure, the problem is that there are way too many points of failure that all have pretty good chances of happening, any single one of which dooms all or most of the clients. Even so, if I had substantially more assets then it would be attractive even at 0-2%.
Most of the points of failure seem like things that could be averted by a small group of people who care about the patients not thawing. Usually when people care about something it is at least feasible, if not inevitable, that all the avertable failures are actually averted. Rocket launches, for example, have at least hundreds of points of potential failure. It sounds like your reasoning would imply that rocket launches could never ever happen. In other words, I’m saying, the points of failure seem pretty correlated with each other, with shared factors being “civilization doesn’t fall apart” and “there’s people with resources who care about the patients”.
See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ebiCeBHr7At8Yyq9R/being-half-rational-about-pascal-s-wager-is-even-worse?commentId=4ZrmawPKwNqMbzMXy
and
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ebiCeBHr7At8Yyq9R/being-half-rational-about-pascal-s-wager-is-even-worse?commentId=XxANusJcNkiRcq7kF
Is your 5% here an actual probability estimate (e.g., you have experience making probability estimates that you get feedback on and followed a similar process in this case; or, you’d make a bet against someone who said “20% probability” or on the other side “1% probability” if it were easy to have the bet resolved), or is it more an impressionistic nonquantitative statement of your sense of the plausibility of cryonics working? I ask because maybe the meta-question here is less “what specifically is JBlack’s expected utility calculation and where might there be important flaws, if any”, and more “how is JBlack dealing with decision making for nebulous questions like cryonics”.
I have in fact looked into cryonics as a possible life-extension mechanism, looked at a bunch of the possible failure modes, and many of these cannot be reliably averted by a group of well-meaning people. If you’re actually trying to model “people who are not currently investing in cryonic preservation”, then it does little good to post hypotheses such as “they are too scared of false hope”. Maybe some are, but certainly not all.
Also yes, my threshold around 5% is where I have calculated that it would be “worth it to me”, and my upper bound (not estimate) of 2% is based on some weeks of investigation of cryonic technology, the social context in which it occurs, and expectations for the next 50 years. If there have been any exciting revolutions in the past ten years that significantly alter these numbers, I haven’t seen them mentioned anywhere (including company websites and sites like this).
As far as bets go, I am literally staking my life on this estimate, am I not?
>then it does little good to post hypotheses such as “they are too scared of false hope”
What would you recommend? I spend time talking to such people, but I’m just one person and I wish there were more theory about this. I’m surprised LW isn’t interested.
>Maybe some are, but certainly not all.
What do view as the main factors?
>many of these cannot be reliably averted by a group of well-meaning people
Which ones are you thinking of? Some that I’m worried about:
-- forceful intervention (e.g. by a state or invader) that prevents people from putting LN in the dewars
-- collapse of civilization, such that it’s too expensive to produce LN and even people who care a lot can’t rig something together (have you looked into this? do you know under what circumstances this might happen?)
-- X-risk, e.g. AGI risk, killing everyone (in particular, preventing humanity from developing nanotech etc.)
> investigation of cryonic technology, the social context in which it occurs, and expectations for the next 50 years
Which seem like key points of failure? You said there’s lots of points of failure, but this doesn’t give an estimate, if we expand conjunctions we have to also expand disjunctions. For example, I could be worried that I might die in a way that makes my cryo-preservation worse—I’m left dead for a few days, there’s physical trauma to my brain, etc. This does decrease the probability of success, but also we have to factor in uncertainty about how good preservation needs to be; it’s not just P(perfect preservation)xP(humanity makes it to nanotech), it’s also additionally P(bad preservation)xP(nanotech)xP(souls can be well reconstructed from bad preservations).
Life insurance costs in the ballpark of your internet bill, give or take. Have you already maxed out on life insurance?
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.