Lots of money spent helping poor people in poor countries has done more harm than good. You wrote: “GiveWell estimates that VillageReach and StopTB save lives at a cost of $1,000 each.” I bet at least $100 of each $1000 goes indirectly to dictators, and because the dictators can count on getting this money they don’t have to do quite as good a job managing their nation’s economy. Also, you need to factor in Malthusian concerns.
If lots of people signup for cryonics the world would become more concerned about the future and devote more resources to existential risks.
I think (but am not sure) that you’re right about this, but even if you are there’s still the question of whether at the margin advocating for cryonics is a worthwhile endeavor. My intuition is that we’re so far away from having a population interested in signing up for cryonics (because of the multitude of irrational biases that people have against cryonics) that advocating for cryonics is a very inefficient way to work against existential risk.
I’d be interested in any evidence that you have that
•Signing up for cryonics motivates people to devote resources to assuaging existential risk.
•It’s feasible to convince a sufficiently large portion of the population to sign up for cryonics so that cryonics is no longer a fringe thing which makes people in the general population uncomfortable around cryonics sign-ups.
A vastly disproportionate percentage of the people who have signup for cryonics are interested in the singularity and have helped the SIAI through paying for some of their conferences. This, I admit, might be due to correlation rather than causation.
Your point is valid, but you seem to have dodged the thrust of my main post. Do you really think that cryonics advocacy is comparable in efficacy to the most efficient ways of working against existential risk? If not, you should not conceptualize cryonics advocacy as philanthropic.
“Do you really think that cryonics advocacy is comparable in efficacy to the most efficient ways of working against existential risk?”
No, but I do think spending money on cryonics probably increases expenditures on existential risk. Cryonics and existential risk spending are complements not substitutes.
Also, your not first best argument against cryonics also applies to over 99.999% of human expenditures and labors.
See my responses to Vladimir_M’s comments here
I think (but am not sure) that you’re right about this, but even if you are there’s still the question of whether at the margin advocating for cryonics is a worthwhile endeavor. My intuition is that we’re so far away from having a population interested in signing up for cryonics (because of the multitude of irrational biases that people have against cryonics) that advocating for cryonics is a very inefficient way to work against existential risk.
I’d be interested in any evidence that you have that
•Signing up for cryonics motivates people to devote resources to assuaging existential risk.
•It’s feasible to convince a sufficiently large portion of the population to sign up for cryonics so that cryonics is no longer a fringe thing which makes people in the general population uncomfortable around cryonics sign-ups.
“I’d be interested in any evidence that you have”
A vastly disproportionate percentage of the people who have signup for cryonics are interested in the singularity and have helped the SIAI through paying for some of their conferences. This, I admit, might be due to correlation rather than causation.
Your point is valid, but you seem to have dodged the thrust of my main post. Do you really think that cryonics advocacy is comparable in efficacy to the most efficient ways of working against existential risk? If not, you should not conceptualize cryonics advocacy as philanthropic.
“Do you really think that cryonics advocacy is comparable in efficacy to the most efficient ways of working against existential risk?”
No, but I do think spending money on cryonics probably increases expenditures on existential risk. Cryonics and existential risk spending are complements not substitutes.
Also, your not first best argument against cryonics also applies to over 99.999% of human expenditures and labors.