How Likely Is Cryonics To Work?

0.10 Something happens to you financially where you can no longer afford this

This one seems conceptually strange in a cost-benefit analysis: if you get into straits in which you don't want to pay your insurance premia and membership fees, then you stop paying and lose the protection (unless you have been suspended or died in the interim). In this situation both the costs and benefits are reduced, so it shouldn't play the role it does in the above calculation.

0.03 You mess up the paperwork, either for cryonics or life insurance

This rate is empirically too high.

0.20 Not all of what makes you you is encoded in the physical state of the brain

Why so high?

0.35 Other (there are always other things that can go wrong)

One does have to inform this probability by historical rates.

Something goes wrong in reviving

A lot of these claims are going to be correlated with each other and brain preservation adequacy (from the first section), likewise for technological/economic capacities and interests. If you apply a mistaken independence assumption and break apart many correlated things you'll get big underestimates of probability.

This is not the first time I've seen an attempt at calculating it; I will note that it's interesting that the more steps you add, the lower your probability gets. It's a strange kind of analysis that can only go downwards...

.03 seems really high for messing up the paperwork. Sure you might mess up the initial paperwork but then it will be noticed and fixed.

.06 seems too low for chance of dying in a circumstance where they can't preserve you. Especially if one isn't very old, the chance of death from sudden trauma is much higher than other forms of death.

The Alzheimer's thing is overestimated. One can in many places (and the number of places is growing) engage in euthanasia. Even in the US people can directly take steps to drastically decrease their lifespans such as by self-starvation. Also, unless you die in very late stage Alzheimer's most of the information is likely to be intact. Alzheimer's also has a very large genetic component, so if no one in one's family got it one is probably safe.

I don't know why you think the cryonic's company running out of capacity should be that likely- with so few people signed up that simply isn't a serious risk.

The insurance company issues aren't a problem. There are companies now which have policies geared to cryonics. And if a company goes insolvent, unless this happens just when you are dying, switching to another insurance company should not be hard.

You seem to be underestimating the risk of anti-cryonics laws. There's already such a law in British Columbia.

You also seem to be assuming that extraction of information from the brain is the only possible option rather than direct revival.

I also don't know how you are combining these various probabilities. This could drastically alter the probability.

 P(failure) = 1-P(success)
 P(total_success) = P(success_a)*P(success_b)*P(success_c)*...

P(failure1)
P(failure2|-failure1)
P(failure3|-failure2&-failure1)
P(failure4|-failure3&-failure2&-failure1)

P(society falls apart | nothing goes wrong in freezing you)

P(society falls apart)

You seem to be assigning a high probability to exotic problems (information isn't preserved by freezing, global apocalypse) and a low probability to mundane problems (you die of Alzheimer's, cryonics companies go out of business). The reverse seems more likely to me.

You die of something like Altzheimers where the brain is degraded at death

Not all of what makes you you is encoded in the physical state of the brain

The current cryonics process is insufficient to preserve everything

You've then got to weight these things against how much you would count a less-than-perfect revival as a partial success. The me that's alive today, after all, is not the same person, in opinions, memories, even abilities, as the me of twenty years ago, but I still count both as "me".

I took your estimates, and sorted them into categories. These are the categories I came up with and their total probability of failure, by your estimate:

0.90 Insurmountable technical obstacle (cryonics process at the time you die (not necessarily today) doesn't preserve everything, or technological development stops prior to development of molecular nanotech, or molecular nanotech doesn't do what we think it does and no substitutes exist)
0.74 Other (wtf?)
0.625 Society chooses to let you die or not resurrect you (companies go bankrupt and no one takes over the maintenance; or no one does the resurrection, conditional on no legal problems)
0.56 Societal collapse or human extinction
0.27 Cryonics or resurrection is banned (but I think this is strongly correlated with societal collapse - they're both caused by insanity)
0.27 You aren't actually frozen or your brain is badly damaged first
0.24 Cryonics companies screw up (improper freezing or later thawing)
0.2 You are not your brain
Overall probability of failure: 0.998

This is wildly, wildly pessimistic. Here are my estimates for the same categories:

0.3 Insurmountable technical obstacle
0.0 Other (this list is exhaustive)
0.05 Cryonics or resurrection is banned
0.2 Society chooses to let you die or not resurrect you
0.25 Societal collapse or human extinction
0.15 You aren't actually frozen or your brain is badly damaged first
0.1 Cryonics companies screw up
0.05 You are not your brain
Overall probability of failure: 0.71

I'd like to see more emphasis on the question: What do we have to do to make cryonics work?

The critics who dismiss cryonics for reasons like the failure points mentioned above have a defensible point of view, given how they've framed the problem.

Someone who thinks like an inventor knowledgeable about biology, by contrast, could say, "No, no, no! Cryonics won't work if you do it THAT way!" He might then try to imagine end results of successful revival from cryostasis, then work backwards based on current scientific knowledge and a parsimonious use of foreseeable technologies to see what the exercise implies about the starting conditions.

If more people would do that, I think we could generate some useful insights into improving the front end of the process.

How exactly have you arrived at these probabilities ? For example, why is the probability of "all people die" 0.3, as opposed to 0.01 or 0.9 ? These numbers seem to be completely arbitrary to me, but maybe I'm missing something.

The probability that cryonics will work likely exceeds 85%, discounting dystopian futures, assuming a good quality of cryopreservation, and assuming that MNT is developed more or less as expected.

The usual error made in these analyses is to imagine many different kinds of "disasters", all correlated, that could cause cryonics to fail, and then multiply their probabilities together. But because all the probabilities are correlated, the resulting overall probability is unrealistically low, often by orders of magnitude.

The only real problems are (a) information theoretic death occurs for one reason or another or (b) the necessary technology to restore you to full health is never developed and applied.

Causing information theoretic death is actually a lot harder than people think. Scrambling information is not destroying information, as cryptanalysis tells us, and the laws of physics are reversible. This whole issue is discussed in Cryonics, Cryptography, and Maximum Likelihood Estimation.

The ability to arrange the atoms from which you are made as might be required to restore you're cryopreserved self to a fully functional and healthy state should be developed in the next several decades. Betting your life that Molecular NanoTechnology (MNT) will not be developed seems singularly foolish given the available evidence.

In today's modern cryopreservations carried out under reasonable conditions the patient's brain is vitrified, making it hard to argue that information theoretic death occurs during cryopreservation. Likewise, it is hard to argue that information theoretic death could occur during storage at the temperature of liquid nitrogen. This leaves us arguing over whether cryonics will work when the cryopreservation is carried out under unreasonable (poor) conditions, if Alcor itself will survive, or if the future will suffer from some dystopian disaster so awful that it makes all our efforts moot.

The most effective way to insure a good cryopreservation is to move close to Alcor before being cryopreserved. Betting your life that Alcor will spontaneously crash and burn seems remarkably pessimistic when the historical record shows that a much smaller Alcor successfully survived many challenges since 1972 and today's Alcor is much better able to survive any future challenges. This is even more true when we can shift the odds in our favor by pitching in and helping insure that Alcor survives, rather than sitting on the sidelines and simply hoping. Dystopian futures seem to be more a projection of an individual's own depression, rather than accurate forecasts of the future.

Which leads to the conclusion that cryonics actually has a high probability of success.

Can I suggest putting this calculation in a google doc so it's easy for people to copy and work out their own estimates?

I upvoted because this is a good effort to make your probabilities explicit.

One meta point: A lot of this seems a bit too nihilistic. Cryonics is small, very small. If you, Jeff Kaufman, decide (and actually go through with the process) of signing up, that act non-trivially decreases the probability that cryonics will be outlawed. If you decide to contribute even in some small way to the (non-profit) org, that act decreases the probability that the org will fail, scaled (enormously) by how actively you engage. If you move closer to the org you sign up with, that increases the probability of a good cryopres. If you don't engage in risky behaviors, that decreases the prob of an acute event which would disallow a cryopres. If you exercise, that decreases the prob of developing AD. And etc.

You seem to be approaching cryonics as pure consumption, when you stand to gain much more (and do much more good, see http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/07/cryonics-as-charity.html) if you consider it more of an active pursuit.

Perhaps it is easier, mentally, to ignore this factor (which others, including Robin Hanson, seem to have done), but it doesn't seem prudent.

There has been some discussion on this thread about who would revive you once you were cryopreserved, and how they would pay for it.

This is covered in the Alcor FAQ (which is really excellent, and well worth browsing):

Q: Who will revive the patients?

A: The short answer is "Alcor will revive them."

The third item in Alcor's mission statement is: "Eventually restore to health all patients in Alcor's care."

Reviving the patients is also required by Alcor's contracts with members: "When, in Alcor's best good faith judgement, it is determined that attempting revival is in the best interests of the Member in cryopreservation, Alcor shall attempt to revive and rehabilitate the Member."

Reviving the patients is also a duty of the Alcor Patient Care Trust: "At such time as Alcor deems that repair and revival of the Patients is feasible, the Trust shall expend whatever amounts of money are necessary to revive the Patients and reintroduce them to society, as long as on-going care of the Patients remaining in biostasis is not endangered. It is the intent of the Trust that such repair and revival proceed in such manner that ongoing Trust earnings reasonably can be predicted to provide for the eventual repair and revival of all Patients."

Financially, the Patient Care Trust should grow in real value over time — compound interest should eventually produce sufficient assets to cover the costs of revival. At the same time, as technology progresses the cost of reviving patients should decrease over time. Eventually, the ever increasing funds available in the PCT should be sufficient to pay for the ever decreasing costs of reviving the patients.

Socially, Alcor is a community. Some members of this community are alive and healthy, while others have been cryopreserved. This community forms an interconnected network of friendships and close ties. At any point in time the healthy members of this network have friends, relatives and loved ones in cryopreservation and will seek to revive them. Once revived, those members will in turn have other friends in cryopreservation, and they will in turn seek to revive them.

The plan is not for "them" to revive us. The plan is that we, the Alcor community, will revive ourselves.

If an American signs up for cryonics and pays their ~$300/year, what are their odds of being revived?

Don't know, "sufficiently small" about covers it. If you have a better ~$300/year bet to gain the whole future, this question would be worth answering.

Less

"the payoff is really high

and more "the payoff is in a different class to anything else that's within a modest salary's reach".

Like, if there were no computers, and everyone did math in their head, and we were still stuck bartering between villages - cryonics is not a shot at a really good deal with a neighbouring village, cryonics is a shot at procuring trucks, gasoline to run them, and a national highway network.

The fact that some of Harvard's brain collection just thawed makes me think it's likely to eventually happen to other institutions, too.

0.30 No one is interested in my brain's information

0.40 It is too expensive to extract my brain's information

I always assumed that the cryonics companies would pay for that with the extra interest. I suppose the second one could still be true if it takes a noticeable portion of the economy.

Too high:

You mess up the paperwork, either for cryonics or life insurance

Some law is passed that prohibits cryonics (before you're even dead)

Not all of what makes you you is encoded in the physical state of the brain

All people die (nuclear war? comet strike? nanotech?)

The technology is never developed to extract the information

It is too expensive to extract my brain's information

Running people in simulation is outlawed

It is too expensive to run me in simulation (if we get this far I expect cheap powerful computers)

Far too low:

You die suddenly or in a circumstance where you would not be able to be frozen in time (see leading causes of death)

Society falls apart (remember this is the chance that society will fall apart given that we did not see "all people die")

About right:

Odds of success: 1 in 567.

The choice to suspend yourself is strictly personal and highly speculative at best despite what you might hear from the various organizations out there or other "true believers". The honest organizations will tell you there are no guarantees and the process is entirely speculative, however if you don't have yourself frozen upon "deanimation" (their word for death) there's a 100% certainty you will not be "reanimated". I first learned about cryonics preservation in 1968 when the movement's founder Robert C.W. Ettinger appeared with Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show. I had my father suspended when he passed in 1989 and my mother two years later in 1991. I also had the family pets, our 2 dogs and cat, suspended later. All five are currently "resting" with Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township, Michigan. In 1992, I had the good fortune to meet Bob Ettinger and his second wife Mae, when one of the A.C.S. (American Cryonics Society) members went to see the then C.I. facility in Oak Park, Michigan. We stayed with the Ettingers for the weekend. Bob and Mae were great hosts and both impressed me as intelligent and forward thinking people who see what is and think what can be. Every great advancement has come from those who refused to accept the current status quo. I look at cryonics as it stands today and think that if technology continues to advance without limitations, both those imposed by nature and by mankind, then someday reanimation will become a reality. The only drawbacks I can envision is the possibility that at some point in the future, either through natural or man made disaster, the human race will succumb to anhiilation or to a lack of interest (possibly due to a lack of progress in scientific advancements) and simply abandon any further attempts to maintain those in suspension or freeze anyone else. If course the field is rent with "what ifs" as any attempt to know the future always is. No one could envision how sustained flight could be achieved until two bicycle shop owners proved it could be done. No one could possibly see how man could leave Earth and travel to the stars a century or more ago. But for a very few who looked beyond the norm and envisioned the possibilities the future held, we would still be earthbound. As I said, this is a highly personal choice, but weighed against the alternative this is a "no brainer". I only wish this process were more affordable for the average person. Life insurance or an annuity are the only ways most can afford the procedure. The procedures themselves, although much improved since the early days of cryonics, are far from desirable. As anyone knows who has stored something in a freezer (much warmer than -321⁰F), anything not secured in a container is desiccated in time. Even things in containers will dehydrate in time. If you have ever seen the body of Ötzi The Iceman, the 5,300yr. old Neolithic bodily found in the Italian Alps, you know what damage freezing can cause. Of course Ötzi was exposed to the elements from time to time over those years but he was a lot warmer as well. The point is no one knows what damage long term suspension itself will cause, especially for the earlier suspensions. Weigh all the factors then decide for yourself.

I really like that you did this, jkaufman - it's good to see a couple breakdowns like this. However, I think this would be best setup as the chance of post-cryonics disasters happening on a yearly basis, so you could modify the final outcome based on a prediction of how long it will take for reviving crynoics patients to be viable. This is harder to do, obviously, but I think it would give a better outcome. The chance of some X-risk before revival are greater if you expect to be preserved for 500 years than if you think we'll be able to revive cryonics patients in 100 years.

If an American signs up for cryonics and pays their ~$300/year, what are their odds of being revived?

This may just be my own intuition running away on me, but it seems like there are two different answers to that question.

In an absolute sense (as in, percentage of everett branches where you are revived from cryonics), the chances are probably pretty slim.

However, in a subjective sense. ("You" experience waking up from cryonics), the chances seem near certain. It's not like you'd be aware of any of the universes where you weren't revived, after all.

I think only a tiny minority of lesswrong readers, believe in cryopreservation. If people genuinely believed in it then they would not wait until they were dying to preserve themselves, since the cumulative risk of death or serious mental debilitation before cryopreservation would be significant, the consequence is loss of (almost) eternal life, while by early cryopreservation all they have to lose is their current, finite life, in the "unlikely" event that they are not successfully reanimated. If people were actually trying to preserve themselves early then there would be a legal debate. There is none (unless I'm mistaken).

Further evidence against this argument is the tiny sums that people are willing to pay. How much would you pay for eternal life? More or less than $8,219 (which is the present value of an annual payment of $300 in perpetuity?). Sounds too cheap to be genuine, too expensive to waste my money on. If I genuinely believed in cryopreservation I would be spending my net worth, which for most americans over 75 years old is > $150k. For less wrong readers, I would guess the median net worth at age 75 would be > $1m.

What is the real probability? I think given the lack of success of humans in making long term predictions suggests that we should admit we simply don't know. Cryopreservation might work. I wouldn't stake my life, or my money on it, and I think there are more important jobs to do first.

Combined Probability Of Failure: 99.82%

Even if your made-up number is accurate, how is that not infinitely preferable to a 100% probability of dieing after a natural human lifespan? I'm not being rhetorical, I'm seriously asking why a 0.18% probability of indefinite survival would not be preferable to a 0% probability of indefinite survival.

The ~78 years you live naturally is certainly less than 0.18% of the lifespan you could have if you get revived, given the assumption that it would be technologically impossible to revive you until after aging is solved.