Wondering vaguely if I’m the only person here who has attempted to sign up for cryonics coverage and been summarily rejected for a basic life insurance plan (I’m transgendered, which automatically makes it very difficult, and have a history of depression, which apparently makes it impossible to get insurance according to the broker I spoke with).
I see a lot of people make arguments (some of them suggesting a hidden true rejection) about why they don’t want it, or why it would be bad. I see a lot of people here make arguments for its widespread adoption, and befuddlement at its rejection (the “Life sucks, but at least you die” post) and the difficulties this poses for spreading the message. And I see a few people argue (somewhat mendaciously in my opinion) for its exclusivity or scarcity, arguing that it’s otherwise of little to no value if just anyone can get signed up.
What I don’t see is a lot of people who’d like to and can’t, particularly for reasons of discrimination. For me, my biggest rejection for a long time was the perception that it was just out of reach of anyone who wasn’t very wealthy, and once I learned otherwise, that obstacle dissipated. Now I’m kind of back to feeling like it’s that way in practice—if you’re not one of the comparatively small number of people who can pay for it out of hand, or a member of any group who’s already statistically screwed by the status quo, then it may as well be out of reach for you.
I doubt the average person who has heard of, and rejected cryonics has gone through this specifically, but it certainly suggests some reasons why it might be a tough sell outside the “core communities” who’re already well-represented in cryonics. Even if we want it, we can’t get it, and the more widely-known that is, the more difficult PR’s going to be among people who’ve already had their opportunities and futures scuppered by the system as it stands.
I’m not saying it’s rational, but from where I stand it’s very hard to blame someone for cynically dismissing the prospect out of hand, or actively opposing it. IMO, the cryonics boosters either need to acknowledge the role that stuff like this plays in people’s relationship to Shiny New Ideas Proposed By Well Educated Financially-Comfortable White Guys From The Bay Area, or just concede that, barring massive systematic reforms in other sectors of society, this will not be an egalitarian technology.
I hope you don’t mind, I’ve copied your message to the New Cryonet mailing list. This is an important issue for the cryonics community to discuss. I think there needs to be a system in place for collecting donations and/or interest to pay for equal access for those who can’t get life insurance. There are a couple of cases I’m aware of where the community raised enough donations to cover uninsurable individuals for CI suspensions.
While my personal case is obviously important to me (it is my life after all), it’s important to me in a more general sense—a lot of people are talking on this site about various ways to fix the world or make it better, yet they’re often not members of the groups who’ve had to pay the costs (through exploitation, marginalization or just by being subject to some society-wide bias against them) to get it to where it is now.
I’m both transgendered and diagnosed with depression, and I’ve had good luck getting insured via Rudi Hoffman. I don’t recall what the name of the insurance company was, and I haven’t heard the final OK since the medical examination, but I don’t foresee any difficulties. I was warned they’ll most likely put me down on male rates (feh) despite being legally female, but I can deal with that even if I don’t like it.
I am 28. long-term unemployed, cannot get a bank account due to issues years ago, living on disability payments and now with support of my domestic partner (which is the main reason my situation isn’t actually desperate any longer). We have to keep our finances pretty separate or my income (~7k a year, wholly inadequate to live on by myself anyplace where I could actually do so) goes away.
I keep a budget, I’m pragmatic and savvy enough to make sure our separate finances on paper don’t unduly restrict us from living our lives as necessary, but I can’t remember the last time I made it to the end of the month with money left over from my benefits check. Sometimes if I’m having a very good month, I’ll not need to use my food stamps balance for that cycle, meaning it’s there when I need extra later.
And to stave off questions about how I could afford cryonics on this level of income: Life insurance can fall within a nice little window of 50 dollars or less, which could plausibly be taken out of my leisure and clothing budgets (it doesn’t consume all of them, but those are the only places in the budget with much wiggle room). Maintaining a membership with the Cryonics institute that depends on a beneficiary payout of that insurance is something like 120 dollars a year—even I can find a way to set that aside.
What I don’t see is a lot of people who’d like to and can’t, particularly for reasons of discrimination.
Are you saying you disagree with the probability estimates of insurance companies regarding the of death of transgendered people with a history of depression for a given year (or did you mean something else)? I’m willing to consider any arguments you have for that proposition, but, as far as I know, the SPRs used by insurance companies are the gold standard of instrumental rationality, so there is a strong presumption that they are (more) correct and that you (or any human expert for that matter) are (more) wrong.
I think they don’t have any deep understanding of it at all—the statistics tell the story the insurance adjusters need to decide on an investment (well, sort of—there actually is no really good data about our long-term heatlh outcomes apart from our rates of violent murder, and it’s hard to tell what would even constitute a reasonable null hypothesis to default to when so many complicated variables are churned up by the medical procedures we often seek), but that decision and those statistics are not truly value-neuitral.
Show me a trans person who hasn’t dealt with depression. I’m sure they exist, but it does not appear to be common. Depression is such a common symptom for us because we’re a mostly-despised minority in the wider world, and just being coerced into our birth-assigned gender roles is often painful and stressful for us (and it only gets worse as we grow up).
Transgendered people in the US face one-in-eight to one-in-twelve murder rates depending on race and geographic location [edit: this claim is unsourced and should be considered retracted; investigation recorded further downthread attempts to pin down the rate more precisely-Jandila]; we’re also something like four times more likely than the national average to be unemployed. From an actuarial perspective, this is clear-cut: bad investment prospect, and that is the purpose of insurance after all.
It’s not neutral to the person affected by it though, because those conditions stem from discrimination against trans people—we aren’t murdered at such high rates because of some evopsychological predisposition in cis people to murder us, or because we’re inherently less capable of fitting into society and/or being value-creating agents in some hypothetical free market. We aren’t unemployed at such vastly high rates because we tend not to have skills or education as a population—and for many of us that don’t, it’s not because we couldn’t cut it in school or the work we were doing before we transitioned.
But instead of, say, considering me on the basis of my actual health (which according to my practicing physician is excellent), it’s a look at the tables. Context is irrelevant in the decision.
Because I’m trans and have a medical history of depression, I am rendered me unable to acquire the otherwise-affordable means of obtaining at least some chance of ensuring my future existence, past the limits of my body as it stands.
It may be legal, it may be justifiable with recourse to a profit motive, it may not be willfully directed at my person in order to cause me ill—but it is discrimination. Our heightened rates of murder and unemployment aren’t typically personally-directed either (we’re targeted for being what we are, not who we are).
It’s also still legal to fire me from a job in most jurisdictions for being transgendered, without even having to hide the fact. Does that tacit authorization in any way cast doubt on whether or not such behavior is discriminatory?
I want to live as much as anybody does. I even want to live an arbitrarily long time, and see the world grow into a better place, as much as any other cryonics booster on this site. I don’t take comfort in beliefs of a spiritual afterlife when faced with the seeming inevitability of death, I don’t consider the fact that dying would hardly make me unique or rarely-disadvantaged among humanity to be any negative influence on seeking to avoid it by whatever plausible means. I don’t think immortality will inherently lead to stagnation or regression in society.
And I don’t get the choice. There is a choice available, but not to me, because the only available means (like most people in the world, I am not arbitrarily able to afford setting aside 30k or so) is denied out of hand, no further fact-finding necessary. That shiny future we cryo-types are hoping to see, but that will likely take longer than our natural lifespans to reach? Is closed off to me.
There’s a whole lot of people like me in the world, who either don’t have financial and social access to the kinds of things that make one rationally able to choose cryo in the first place for whatever reason. I daresay most of them would also reject cryonics because they don’t have a rationalist’s understanding of death, its implications and what they could do about it—but rationality training will only solve one of those problems.
Transgendered people in the US face one-in-eight to one-in-twelve murder rates depending on race and geographic location;
I’ve seen this claim before but I’ve never seen it attached to a reliable source. Do you have a citation for it? The HCR estimates that there are about 15-30 murders of transgendered people each year. If we underestimate the percentage of the American population that is trans using the HCR’s data and use the lower bound estimate that 1 in every 3000 people are transgendered (here I’m using the cited Conway study that says lower bound of 1 in 2500 and underestimating a bit more both to make the math easier and to make sure we’re very definitely not overcounting, note that Conway’s upper bound is in 1 in 500) then we get with a US population of around three hundred million, a total of about 100,000 trans people in the US. Now if we assume that all those trans murders are evenly distributed (which seems to be really unlikely), we get assuming that they have around 60 years of time to get murdered, with a 30⁄100,000 chance each year, we get a chance of 1-(1-(30/100,000))^60 chance of getting murdered in their lifetimes (60 comes from assuming that they know they are transgendered around age 12 and then have 60 years of time to get murdered). That’s around a 2.8% chance. That’s really high, but nowhere near 1 in 12 which is more than twice that (8.3%) . In this context, this occurs with 1⁄12 being the claimed lower bound, and with us assuming a generously large number of murders yearly and a generously small transgender population, and are still off by a factor of 2.
Note if one uses for example a population estimate based on the middle of Conway’s range (1 in a 1000 being transgendered) then one gets a result of around .006%, which is about 50% percent more likely than the entire US pop but is even farther from the claimed numbers.
Edit: Ok. Th HRC also on the same webpage but with minimal arithmetic claim that 1 in every 1000 murders might be a transgendered person. If we use this estimate and assume that there are then around 140 transgendered murders yearly, and use the reasonable estimate of 1 in every 1000 people being transgendered so a total pop of around 300,000 then one gets (1-(1-140/300,000)^60) which is around a 3% chance.
Edit: If you use the most generous estimate for the murder total (140), and the smallest population estimate for the transgendered population then you can get 8% which is a little under 1⁄12. Here I’m using my underestimate of Conway’s estimate. If one uses Conway’s actual lower bound one gets around 7%. I don’t think I need to discuss in detail why this estimate is unlikely to be accurate. It seems clear from these estimates that the murder rate of transgendered individuals is much higher than that of the general population (especially when considered as a relative rate), but it is not likely to be anywhere near 1/12th.
You know, I can’t find a good source for it now, and it appears to be an apocryphal claim. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve picked up an oft-quoted but exaggerated statistic about this issue. I’m a bit of a newb, but I’ll try to strikethrough that claim. ETA: The Help guide doesn’t list that particular markup. Someone throw me a bone?
A look at Carsten Balzer’s 2009 study claims that a recent attempt to monitor the rate of reported murders worldwide (their criteria were basically “can be accessed by a newspaper website or some other online source during a google search, after filtering for duplicates”) gave a rate of about one reported murder every three days. Source is here:
As far as I’m aware, strikethrough is not available through markdown as it is implemented on this site; to get the strikethrough effect you have to retract your entire post.
I think the current norm on LessWrong is putting “edit to add: I no longer believe this claim to be true” in parentheses after the claim. I think your idea of strikethrough is really good, though.
The deleted comment was mine. It was deleted before anyone responded or up/down voted it.
I feared that I had completely misunderstood what Jandila had said and didn’t think anyone would miss it. Now that I see that I didn’t misunderstand the original comment, I regret having deleted it. Is there anyway to recover a deleted comment?
Wondering vaguely if I’m the only person here who has attempted to sign up for cryonics coverage and been summarily rejected for a basic life insurance plan (I’m transgendered, which automatically makes it very difficult, and have a history of depression, which apparently makes it impossible to get insurance according to the broker I spoke with).
I see a lot of people make arguments (some of them suggesting a hidden true rejection) about why they don’t want it, or why it would be bad. I see a lot of people here make arguments for its widespread adoption, and befuddlement at its rejection (the “Life sucks, but at least you die” post) and the difficulties this poses for spreading the message. And I see a few people argue (somewhat mendaciously in my opinion) for its exclusivity or scarcity, arguing that it’s otherwise of little to no value if just anyone can get signed up.
What I don’t see is a lot of people who’d like to and can’t, particularly for reasons of discrimination. For me, my biggest rejection for a long time was the perception that it was just out of reach of anyone who wasn’t very wealthy, and once I learned otherwise, that obstacle dissipated. Now I’m kind of back to feeling like it’s that way in practice—if you’re not one of the comparatively small number of people who can pay for it out of hand, or a member of any group who’s already statistically screwed by the status quo, then it may as well be out of reach for you.
I doubt the average person who has heard of, and rejected cryonics has gone through this specifically, but it certainly suggests some reasons why it might be a tough sell outside the “core communities” who’re already well-represented in cryonics. Even if we want it, we can’t get it, and the more widely-known that is, the more difficult PR’s going to be among people who’ve already had their opportunities and futures scuppered by the system as it stands.
I’m not saying it’s rational, but from where I stand it’s very hard to blame someone for cynically dismissing the prospect out of hand, or actively opposing it. IMO, the cryonics boosters either need to acknowledge the role that stuff like this plays in people’s relationship to Shiny New Ideas Proposed By Well Educated Financially-Comfortable White Guys From The Bay Area, or just concede that, barring massive systematic reforms in other sectors of society, this will not be an egalitarian technology.
I hope you don’t mind, I’ve copied your message to the New Cryonet mailing list. This is an important issue for the cryonics community to discuss. I think there needs to be a system in place for collecting donations and/or interest to pay for equal access for those who can’t get life insurance. There are a couple of cases I’m aware of where the community raised enough donations to cover uninsurable individuals for CI suspensions.
I don’t mind.
While my personal case is obviously important to me (it is my life after all), it’s important to me in a more general sense—a lot of people are talking on this site about various ways to fix the world or make it better, yet they’re often not members of the groups who’ve had to pay the costs (through exploitation, marginalization or just by being subject to some society-wide bias against them) to get it to where it is now.
I’m both transgendered and diagnosed with depression, and I’ve had good luck getting insured via Rudi Hoffman. I don’t recall what the name of the insurance company was, and I haven’t heard the final OK since the medical examination, but I don’t foresee any difficulties. I was warned they’ll most likely put me down on male rates (feh) despite being legally female, but I can deal with that even if I don’t like it.
Same broker. Did you mention the depression to him explicitly?
Yes. I’m not taking any medication for it, which might have affected it.
That question never came up in my conversation with him, oddly. So I’m left wondering what the decisive difference is. shrug
If you don’t mind me asking—how old are you and how much money do you typically save a year?
Bad assumption, but I’ll answer.
I am 28. long-term unemployed, cannot get a bank account due to issues years ago, living on disability payments and now with support of my domestic partner (which is the main reason my situation isn’t actually desperate any longer). We have to keep our finances pretty separate or my income (~7k a year, wholly inadequate to live on by myself anyplace where I could actually do so) goes away.
I keep a budget, I’m pragmatic and savvy enough to make sure our separate finances on paper don’t unduly restrict us from living our lives as necessary, but I can’t remember the last time I made it to the end of the month with money left over from my benefits check. Sometimes if I’m having a very good month, I’ll not need to use my food stamps balance for that cycle, meaning it’s there when I need extra later.
And to stave off questions about how I could afford cryonics on this level of income: Life insurance can fall within a nice little window of 50 dollars or less, which could plausibly be taken out of my leisure and clothing budgets (it doesn’t consume all of them, but those are the only places in the budget with much wiggle room). Maintaining a membership with the Cryonics institute that depends on a beneficiary payout of that insurance is something like 120 dollars a year—even I can find a way to set that aside.
Are you saying you disagree with the probability estimates of insurance companies regarding the of death of transgendered people with a history of depression for a given year (or did you mean something else)? I’m willing to consider any arguments you have for that proposition, but, as far as I know, the SPRs used by insurance companies are the gold standard of instrumental rationality, so there is a strong presumption that they are (more) correct and that you (or any human expert for that matter) are (more) wrong.
I think they don’t have any deep understanding of it at all—the statistics tell the story the insurance adjusters need to decide on an investment (well, sort of—there actually is no really good data about our long-term heatlh outcomes apart from our rates of violent murder, and it’s hard to tell what would even constitute a reasonable null hypothesis to default to when so many complicated variables are churned up by the medical procedures we often seek), but that decision and those statistics are not truly value-neuitral.
Show me a trans person who hasn’t dealt with depression. I’m sure they exist, but it does not appear to be common. Depression is such a common symptom for us because we’re a mostly-despised minority in the wider world, and just being coerced into our birth-assigned gender roles is often painful and stressful for us (and it only gets worse as we grow up).
Transgendered people in the US face one-in-eight to one-in-twelve murder rates depending on race and geographic location [edit: this claim is unsourced and should be considered retracted; investigation recorded further downthread attempts to pin down the rate more precisely-Jandila]; we’re also something like four times more likely than the national average to be unemployed. From an actuarial perspective, this is clear-cut: bad investment prospect, and that is the purpose of insurance after all.
It’s not neutral to the person affected by it though, because those conditions stem from discrimination against trans people—we aren’t murdered at such high rates because of some evopsychological predisposition in cis people to murder us, or because we’re inherently less capable of fitting into society and/or being value-creating agents in some hypothetical free market. We aren’t unemployed at such vastly high rates because we tend not to have skills or education as a population—and for many of us that don’t, it’s not because we couldn’t cut it in school or the work we were doing before we transitioned.
But instead of, say, considering me on the basis of my actual health (which according to my practicing physician is excellent), it’s a look at the tables. Context is irrelevant in the decision.
Because I’m trans and have a medical history of depression, I am rendered me unable to acquire the otherwise-affordable means of obtaining at least some chance of ensuring my future existence, past the limits of my body as it stands.
It may be legal, it may be justifiable with recourse to a profit motive, it may not be willfully directed at my person in order to cause me ill—but it is discrimination. Our heightened rates of murder and unemployment aren’t typically personally-directed either (we’re targeted for being what we are, not who we are).
It’s also still legal to fire me from a job in most jurisdictions for being transgendered, without even having to hide the fact. Does that tacit authorization in any way cast doubt on whether or not such behavior is discriminatory?
I want to live as much as anybody does. I even want to live an arbitrarily long time, and see the world grow into a better place, as much as any other cryonics booster on this site. I don’t take comfort in beliefs of a spiritual afterlife when faced with the seeming inevitability of death, I don’t consider the fact that dying would hardly make me unique or rarely-disadvantaged among humanity to be any negative influence on seeking to avoid it by whatever plausible means. I don’t think immortality will inherently lead to stagnation or regression in society.
And I don’t get the choice. There is a choice available, but not to me, because the only available means (like most people in the world, I am not arbitrarily able to afford setting aside 30k or so) is denied out of hand, no further fact-finding necessary. That shiny future we cryo-types are hoping to see, but that will likely take longer than our natural lifespans to reach? Is closed off to me.
There’s a whole lot of people like me in the world, who either don’t have financial and social access to the kinds of things that make one rationally able to choose cryo in the first place for whatever reason. I daresay most of them would also reject cryonics because they don’t have a rationalist’s understanding of death, its implications and what they could do about it—but rationality training will only solve one of those problems.
I’ve seen this claim before but I’ve never seen it attached to a reliable source. Do you have a citation for it? The HCR estimates that there are about 15-30 murders of transgendered people each year. If we underestimate the percentage of the American population that is trans using the HCR’s data and use the lower bound estimate that 1 in every 3000 people are transgendered (here I’m using the cited Conway study that says lower bound of 1 in 2500 and underestimating a bit more both to make the math easier and to make sure we’re very definitely not overcounting, note that Conway’s upper bound is in 1 in 500) then we get with a US population of around three hundred million, a total of about 100,000 trans people in the US. Now if we assume that all those trans murders are evenly distributed (which seems to be really unlikely), we get assuming that they have around 60 years of time to get murdered, with a 30⁄100,000 chance each year, we get a chance of 1-(1-(30/100,000))^60 chance of getting murdered in their lifetimes (60 comes from assuming that they know they are transgendered around age 12 and then have 60 years of time to get murdered). That’s around a 2.8% chance. That’s really high, but nowhere near 1 in 12 which is more than twice that (8.3%) . In this context, this occurs with 1⁄12 being the claimed lower bound, and with us assuming a generously large number of murders yearly and a generously small transgender population, and are still off by a factor of 2.
Note if one uses for example a population estimate based on the middle of Conway’s range (1 in a 1000 being transgendered) then one gets a result of around .006%, which is about 50% percent more likely than the entire US pop but is even farther from the claimed numbers.
Edit: Ok. Th HRC also on the same webpage but with minimal arithmetic claim that 1 in every 1000 murders might be a transgendered person. If we use this estimate and assume that there are then around 140 transgendered murders yearly, and use the reasonable estimate of 1 in every 1000 people being transgendered so a total pop of around 300,000 then one gets (1-(1-140/300,000)^60) which is around a 3% chance.
Edit: If you use the most generous estimate for the murder total (140), and the smallest population estimate for the transgendered population then you can get 8% which is a little under 1⁄12. Here I’m using my underestimate of Conway’s estimate. If one uses Conway’s actual lower bound one gets around 7%. I don’t think I need to discuss in detail why this estimate is unlikely to be accurate. It seems clear from these estimates that the murder rate of transgendered individuals is much higher than that of the general population (especially when considered as a relative rate), but it is not likely to be anywhere near 1/12th.
You know, I can’t find a good source for it now, and it appears to be an apocryphal claim. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve picked up an oft-quoted but exaggerated statistic about this issue. I’m a bit of a newb, but I’ll try to strikethrough that claim. ETA: The Help guide doesn’t list that particular markup. Someone throw me a bone?
A look at Carsten Balzer’s 2009 study claims that a recent attempt to monitor the rate of reported murders worldwide (their criteria were basically “can be accessed by a newspaper website or some other online source during a google search, after filtering for duplicates”) gave a rate of about one reported murder every three days. Source is here:
http://www.liminalis.de/2009_03/TMM/tmm-englisch/Liminalis-2009-TMM-report2008-2009-en.pdf
As far as I’m aware, strikethrough is not available through markdown as it is implemented on this site; to get the strikethrough effect you have to retract your entire post.
Thank you for the clarification.
I think the current norm on LessWrong is putting “edit to add: I no longer believe this claim to be true” in parentheses after the claim. I think your idea of strikethrough is really good, though.
Nope, no strikethrough. Weird.
The deleted comment was mine. It was deleted before anyone responded or up/down voted it.
I feared that I had completely misunderstood what Jandila had said and didn’t think anyone would miss it. Now that I see that I didn’t misunderstand the original comment, I regret having deleted it. Is there anyway to recover a deleted comment?
No, but you could just reply to Jandila’s current comment with a comment explaining what you had meant in the deleted comment.
No.
Is it even missing from Jandila’s inbox?