For most people, cryonics is a terrible use of resources. I’m entirely opposed to deathism, but I’d still never sign up for cryonics unless I had, as a rule of thumb, enough wealth to pay cash for it. It’s too chancy for me to devote too significant a chunk of my wealth to it—the opportunity costs are too high for the gamble.
Do you have a back-of-the-envelope calculation for this finding? Something which illustrates for which values of ‘chance of success’ and ‘value of success’ and opportunity cost this holds true for? Obviously depending on those beliefs other people can be expected to agree or disagree with your conclusion, while accepting your reasoning.
I hadn’t done the math when making the above post, but let’s do some here. We’ll assume that cryonics has a 10% chance of actually working, and that the added lifespan you’ll get is equal to a 2% chance of dying per year(because they presumably won’t have entirely conquered death when you get back, but they’ll have better medicine than we do and presumably won’t be bothered resurrecting you unless there’s good reason). This means that the math works out to cryonics being the equivalent of buying an average of 5 extra years of life. You may want to also add some discounting for declining utility of lifespan, the fact that everyone you know will likely be dead, and for the fact that you’re gambling, and I think my assumptions are generous, but we’ll take 5 years as a baseline.
On the flip side, cryonics costs about $100,000 at present. You also need to factor in the costs of supporting yourself in your second life, unless your body will be getting repaired to the point where you can reasonably work again—with your hideously outdated skills, you’re not likely to be getting a desk job, so you’ll probably need to be young again to work. It’s easy to say you’ll take out insurance to pay for it, but insurance companies aren’t in the business of giving away free money, so in practice you need to put up the present value of it over the course of your actuarial lifespan.
Mathematical utility calculations are generally only mathematical playthings, not serious numbers(I tried doing one in my first draft of this post, it said the breakeven for buying cryonics was $2500 of annual income, which is clearly absurd), so I can’t judge it numerically. But you’re dropping $100k on an extra five years of life. I don’t think that can be justified if you’re poor—you’d do better improving your guaranteed life than playing the lottery. If you have the cash, sure—it’s a better cash sink than some. But it’s a big gamble, and I don’t advocate gambling with your life savings.
Do you have a back-of-the-envelope calculation for this finding? Something which illustrates for which values of ‘chance of success’ and ‘value of success’ and opportunity cost this holds true for? Obviously depending on those beliefs other people can be expected to agree or disagree with your conclusion, while accepting your reasoning.
I hadn’t done the math when making the above post, but let’s do some here. We’ll assume that cryonics has a 10% chance of actually working, and that the added lifespan you’ll get is equal to a 2% chance of dying per year(because they presumably won’t have entirely conquered death when you get back, but they’ll have better medicine than we do and presumably won’t be bothered resurrecting you unless there’s good reason). This means that the math works out to cryonics being the equivalent of buying an average of 5 extra years of life. You may want to also add some discounting for declining utility of lifespan, the fact that everyone you know will likely be dead, and for the fact that you’re gambling, and I think my assumptions are generous, but we’ll take 5 years as a baseline.
On the flip side, cryonics costs about $100,000 at present. You also need to factor in the costs of supporting yourself in your second life, unless your body will be getting repaired to the point where you can reasonably work again—with your hideously outdated skills, you’re not likely to be getting a desk job, so you’ll probably need to be young again to work. It’s easy to say you’ll take out insurance to pay for it, but insurance companies aren’t in the business of giving away free money, so in practice you need to put up the present value of it over the course of your actuarial lifespan.
Mathematical utility calculations are generally only mathematical playthings, not serious numbers(I tried doing one in my first draft of this post, it said the breakeven for buying cryonics was $2500 of annual income, which is clearly absurd), so I can’t judge it numerically. But you’re dropping $100k on an extra five years of life. I don’t think that can be justified if you’re poor—you’d do better improving your guaranteed life than playing the lottery. If you have the cash, sure—it’s a better cash sink than some. But it’s a big gamble, and I don’t advocate gambling with your life savings.