I was raised to consider organ donation to be the moral thing to do on my death.
I am less skeptical than average of cryonics, and nervous about “neuro” options since I’d prefer to be revived earlier and with a body. On the other hand, it still seems to me that organ donation is the more effective option for more-people-being-alive-and-happy, even if it’s not me.
Am I stuck with the “neuro” option for myself? How should that translate to my children?
What do most people on LW think about organ donation?
ETA: the Cryonics Institute (the only page I’ve seen linked here) doesn’t have that option, so am I stuck paying much more? Informative links would be appreciated.
To make up for not being an organ donor cut back on some area of personal consumption and donate the money to a charity. Since the probability of someone actually getting your organs if you agreed to be an organ donor are, I think, very low you wouldn’t have to give that much to a charity for you do be doing more social good through the charitable contribution than you would have as a potential organ donor.
So does the lack of discussion of organ donation stem from its perceived lack of efficacy? If so why discuss cryonics so heavily, when it costs money? I remember Robin Hanson assigning it around a 5% chance of success (for his personal setup, not cryonics eventually working at all which I assume would be much higher), and I would naively assume that I have a greater than 5% chance of my organs helping someone (any statistics on this?).
I agree that donating to charity is likely to be more effective, but it is also likely to be more effective than cryonics (as discussed elsewhere) and donating organs doesn’t actually take away from my charity funds.
I don’t mean to speak to making agreements for children, I think that stands as the right thing to do.
You don’t have a fixed amount of charity funds, you have the amount you choose to give.
Fly to a really poor country. Seek out a very poor family that has lots of kids. Give this family $1,000, which could easily be five years income for this family. On average you will have done much more good than if you spent this $1,000 on yourself and signed up to be an organ donor. Make sure this $1,000 does not reduce your other charitable giving.
If you had cancer would you forgo treatment because the out-of-pocket amount you would have to pay for the treatment would have been better spent helping others?
This is not a rational answer to the question of whether it is more ethical to sign up for cryonics or donate organs, it is a rationalization. If magfrump decides it is more ethical to sign up for cryonics than donate his organs, he must decide this based on the ethics of those two choices. Someone might rationalize that it’s OK to be less ethical ‘over here’ if they’re more ethical ‘over there’, but it still doesn’t change the ethics of those two choices.
The exception is if the ethics ‘over here’ and the ethics ‘over there’ are inter-dependent. So donating money to a family in a poor country would be ethically relevant if one choice facilitates donating to the family and one does not. Here, we have the exact opposite of what was suggested: magrump can use the money he saves from not signing up for cryonics to help the family, and so he can consider this an argument in favor of the ethicality of not signing up for cryonics.
(But, magfrump, I would add that we also have an ethical obligation to value our own lives. The symmetry in ethics-space can usually be found. Here, I can identify it in the hypothetical space where cryonics works: the person who needs an organ can also be cryonically suspended, perhaps until an organ is available. Then you both could live. In the space where cryonics doesn’t work, organ donation is more ethical, since at least one of you can live.)
The “best” organ donors are young people who suffered a massive head trauma, typically in a motor vehicle accident… If you die in a situation where cryopreservation can proceed, you will probably be too old or too diseased for your organs to be of use. So perhaps the two options are not exclusive after all.
So as a young person with very little chance of dying from disease and very little money it would be better to stay an organ donor now and sign up for cryonics when I’m older and have more money?
This was the intuitive conclusion I reached but I wasn’t aware of the “‘best’ organ donors’ being certain demographics.
BTW that intuitively seems right, but I’m curious where you got the information.
I was raised to consider organ donation to be the moral thing to do on my death.
I am less skeptical than average of cryonics, and nervous about “neuro” options since I’d prefer to be revived earlier and with a body. On the other hand, it still seems to me that organ donation is the more effective option for more-people-being-alive-and-happy, even if it’s not me.
Am I stuck with the “neuro” option for myself? How should that translate to my children?
What do most people on LW think about organ donation?
ETA: the Cryonics Institute (the only page I’ve seen linked here) doesn’t have that option, so am I stuck paying much more? Informative links would be appreciated.
To make up for not being an organ donor cut back on some area of personal consumption and donate the money to a charity. Since the probability of someone actually getting your organs if you agreed to be an organ donor are, I think, very low you wouldn’t have to give that much to a charity for you do be doing more social good through the charitable contribution than you would have as a potential organ donor.
So does the lack of discussion of organ donation stem from its perceived lack of efficacy? If so why discuss cryonics so heavily, when it costs money? I remember Robin Hanson assigning it around a 5% chance of success (for his personal setup, not cryonics eventually working at all which I assume would be much higher), and I would naively assume that I have a greater than 5% chance of my organs helping someone (any statistics on this?).
I agree that donating to charity is likely to be more effective, but it is also likely to be more effective than cryonics (as discussed elsewhere) and donating organs doesn’t actually take away from my charity funds.
I don’t mean to speak to making agreements for children, I think that stands as the right thing to do.
You don’t have a fixed amount of charity funds, you have the amount you choose to give.
Fly to a really poor country. Seek out a very poor family that has lots of kids. Give this family $1,000, which could easily be five years income for this family. On average you will have done much more good than if you spent this $1,000 on yourself and signed up to be an organ donor. Make sure this $1,000 does not reduce your other charitable giving.
If you had cancer would you forgo treatment because the out-of-pocket amount you would have to pay for the treatment would have been better spent helping others?
This is not a rational answer to the question of whether it is more ethical to sign up for cryonics or donate organs, it is a rationalization. If magfrump decides it is more ethical to sign up for cryonics than donate his organs, he must decide this based on the ethics of those two choices. Someone might rationalize that it’s OK to be less ethical ‘over here’ if they’re more ethical ‘over there’, but it still doesn’t change the ethics of those two choices.
The exception is if the ethics ‘over here’ and the ethics ‘over there’ are inter-dependent. So donating money to a family in a poor country would be ethically relevant if one choice facilitates donating to the family and one does not. Here, we have the exact opposite of what was suggested: magrump can use the money he saves from not signing up for cryonics to help the family, and so he can consider this an argument in favor of the ethicality of not signing up for cryonics.
(But, magfrump, I would add that we also have an ethical obligation to value our own lives. The symmetry in ethics-space can usually be found. Here, I can identify it in the hypothetical space where cryonics works: the person who needs an organ can also be cryonically suspended, perhaps until an organ is available. Then you both could live. In the space where cryonics doesn’t work, organ donation is more ethical, since at least one of you can live.)
The “best” organ donors are young people who suffered a massive head trauma, typically in a motor vehicle accident… If you die in a situation where cryopreservation can proceed, you will probably be too old or too diseased for your organs to be of use. So perhaps the two options are not exclusive after all.
So as a young person with very little chance of dying from disease and very little money it would be better to stay an organ donor now and sign up for cryonics when I’m older and have more money?
This was the intuitive conclusion I reached but I wasn’t aware of the “‘best’ organ donors’ being certain demographics. BTW that intuitively seems right, but I’m curious where you got the information.
Well, I do know that cryopreservation and organ donation are currently mutually exclusive, even if you go with a “neuro” option.
I don’t know whether it’s better to sign up for cryonics or to be an organ donor.