Robin Hanson's Cryonics Hour

I don't think the following belonged in the OP, but it's worth saying:

Why was there such a difference for me between a conversation with RH and his more public outputs? My opinion is that he's very good at pointing out specific gaps in reasoning, which is extremely productive when it's your own reasoning. But when you're reading or watching Robin's exchange with someone else, it's all too tempting to think that he's picking nits and that the other person is just failing to respond in the correct way (i.e. the exact way that you'd respond, to which you don't see a counterargument from RH).

There are argumentative devices to circumvent this problem and make oneself more persuasive to an audience, but Robin doesn't seem to employ those as much as the norm.

I strongly second this. I recently had the chance to have a drink with Robin and Katja Grace in London, and it is a candidate for the most interesting conversation I have had in my entire life.

Would you feel comfortable with sharing some of the things you talked about, and/or some of the topics you're now reconsidering? I think they might be pretty interesting.

Having looked through the cryonics insurance options, I am having trouble justifying one vs a regular life insurance.

I think that an accident resulting in death makes cryo insurance a loss both to the insured and the estate, as the odds of both brain remaining intact and timely freezing are quite bad. So all you have left is the altruistic feeling of financing a cryo organization. If that's what you are after, donate explicitly.

If you get too demented or brain-damaged to handle your affairs, getting frozen is probably not a good idea anyway, since most of your personality is gone by then, and the odds of recovery are almost non-existent.

If you have a life insurance and get terminally ill, there are several ways to draw cash against the policy's value while you are still alive, and fund your cryosuspension that way.

If you want to guard against greedy relatives, (Rudi Hoffman's example), then drawing cash from your life insurance policy while still alive seems like a way to do it.

In summary, I am hard pressed to find a probable situation where a cryo insurance is preferable to a general whole life or universal life insurance, unless you have no one but yourself to care about. What am I missing here?

What I'd really like is a YouTube video of Robin Hanson singing a particular Gilbert and Sullivan song. ;)

Yet everybody says I'm such a disagreeable man
And I can't think why!

Robin is an order of magnitude more stimulating/persuasive/informative than reading OB or even watching him debate someone else, and I'm now reconsidering my thinking on a number of topics as a result.

Would you let him out of the box, were he an AI?