Years saved: Cryonics vs VillageReach

Upvoted for actually applying arithmetic!

Thank you! I think this is my favorite compliment from here :)

I'm not sure I follow. My post wasn't about the singularity, just a simple "years lived" calculation.

That's exactly correct. But if you take post-singularity life into account, survivors from our time are competing for resources with new lives. If you fix the date of the singularity and trust post-singularity resources to be allocated optimally, our decisions don't have moral consequence beyond the singularity; we can't take credit for the 28k years either way.

This shifts the argument to estimates of the time frame of a technological singularity.

The entire Fun Theory sequence needs to be marked as highly speculative, relative to the rest of the Sequences. Some of the speculation gives us tentative lower bounds on Fun, but some of it (like Continuous Improvement) should be used in qualitative senses only.

Sadly, math requires me to pick some sort of number. I was mostly just tired of hearing "cryonics wins because it produces infinite years, vs finite mortal years." It takes a very optimistic assumption to produce an infinitely long and still-fun immortal life, and seems to be less reasoning and more a Pascal's Wager.

I figured Fun Theory would produce a quick and relatively unobjectionable number, and certainly didn't think I could produce a better number via any other method. The actual value is relatively unimportant to me, and I recognize the sequence as being especially tentative.

If one wishes to conclude that there is no viable number due to the error bars being too huge, that's fine. It just means "years lived" is an unevaluable criteria.

Do you think it's too large, too small, or just has huge error bars?

You can choose not to use math but you can't avoid choosing between alternatives. Perhaps we implicitly assume that either the "fun-years" or cryonics probabilities are lower than those used to account for the fact that there is no cryonics charity?

I would expect the existential risk reduction returns from encouraging long-term thinking by getting people to sign up for cryonics to be dwarfed by the returns from encouraging long-term thinking directly, and I would expect those returns to be dwarfed by the returns from encouraging rational long-term thinking on especially important topics.

Donating to VillageReach signals philanthropic intention and affords networking opportunities with other people who care about global welfare who might be persuaded to work against x-risk

Also, donating to VillageReach saves people's lives, and those people will have agency and abilities and may very well contribute to existential risk reduction.

1. If I remember correctly, infant mortality rate in sub-Saharan Africa is around 10%; by way of contrast with that of ~ 1% in the United States. I think (but am not sure) that the bulk of this difference is due to vaccinations. I can dig up a citation if you'd like me to.

2. Even if the 10% infant mortality remained with vaccinations, in absence of evidence to the contrary one should expect that saving ten infants will allow nine of them to live past infancy.

3. According to GiveWell's page on standard of living in the developing world sub-Saharan Africans have about a 50% chance of living to age 65.

It's worth noting that standard life expectancy figures include infant mortality, etc. and thus already account for this. I believe the average life expectancy is actually ~65 years if you correct for infant mortality.