Life insurance companies need to make a profit, but there’s a large gain from trade when you swap the life insurance proceeds for a cryonic suspension(1). The net return on the whole transaction is not necessarily negative.
(1) Though technically, the gain from trade isn’t just from trading money for cryonics, since money has no intrinsic value, just opportunity costs. The gain-from-trade comes from the three steps of (a) working some hours to get money, (b) trade small amounts of money in most Everett branches for large amounts of money in Everett branches where you die, which involves paying some overhead (c) trade life insurance proceeds for many hours in those branches. The gains emerge in steps (a) and (c).
The reason I’m not currently persuaded that cryonics is worth it for me is that it is one of quite a large number of things I could do that have a very low probability of a very large benefit. With cryonics there’s a high level of uncertainty around both the probability of success and the magnitude of the benefit. I don’t have the time or resources to sign up for all such things, nor do I currently have the inclination to devote the resources to investigating all of them thoroughly enough to narrow the uncertainty. Cryonics is hovering around the level where additional research may seem worthwhile whereas, say, buddhism is not. It hasn’t quite crossed the threshold yet however.
Life insurance companies need to make a profit, but there’s a large gain from trade when you swap the life insurance proceeds for a cryonic suspension(1). The net return on the whole transaction is not necessarily negative.
(1) Though technically, the gain from trade isn’t just from trading money for cryonics, since money has no intrinsic value, just opportunity costs. The gain-from-trade comes from the three steps of (a) working some hours to get money, (b) trade small amounts of money in most Everett branches for large amounts of money in Everett branches where you die, which involves paying some overhead (c) trade life insurance proceeds for many hours in those branches. The gains emerge in steps (a) and (c).
The reason I’m not currently persuaded that cryonics is worth it for me is that it is one of quite a large number of things I could do that have a very low probability of a very large benefit. With cryonics there’s a high level of uncertainty around both the probability of success and the magnitude of the benefit. I don’t have the time or resources to sign up for all such things, nor do I currently have the inclination to devote the resources to investigating all of them thoroughly enough to narrow the uncertainty. Cryonics is hovering around the level where additional research may seem worthwhile whereas, say, buddhism is not. It hasn’t quite crossed the threshold yet however.