Why I haven't signed up for cryonics

James D. Miller does this in his Singularity Rising book. I leave articulating the logical problem with this claim as an exercise to the reader)

I would be grateful if you would tell me what the logical problem is.

I've noticed a weird cognitive dissonance among cryonicists where they talk a good game about how much they believe in scientific progress, technological acceleration and so forth - yet they seem totally unconcerned about the fact that we just don't see this alleged trend happening in cryonics technology, despite its numerous inadequacies.

The problem of people compartmentalizing between what they think is valuable and what they ought to be working on is pretty universal. That being said, it does make cryonics less likely to succeed, and thus worth less; it's just a failure mode that might be hard to solve.

In other words, transhumanism promotes a way of thinking which tends to make transhumanists spectators of, instead of active participants in, creating the sort of future they want to see.

I believe I've seen Mike Darwin and others specifically point to Eliezer as an example of a cryonics proponent who is increasing the number and ratio of spectator cryonauts, rather than active cryonauts.

No one is working on cryonics because there's no money/interest because no one is signed up for cryonics. Probably the "easiest" way to solve this problem is to convince the general public that cryonics is a good idea. Then someone will care about making it better.

Some rich patron funding it all sounds good, but I can't think of a recent example where one person funded a significant R&D advance in any field.

In other words, transhumanism promotes a way of thinking which tends to make transhumanists spectators of, instead of active participants in, creating the sort of future they want to see. And cryonics has become a casualty of this screwed up world view, when it didn't have to turn out that way. Why exert yourself to improve cryonics' scientific credibility - again, in ways which neuroscientists would have to take seriously - when you believe that friendly AI's, Drexler's genie-like nanomachines and the technological singularity will solve your problems in the next 20-30 years? And as a bonus, this wonderful world in 2045 or so will also revive almost all the cryonauts, no matter how badly damaged their brains.

applause. If there actually existed a cryopreservation technique that had been proven to really work in animal models - or better yet in human volunteers! - I would go ahead and sign up. But it doesn't exist, and instead of telling me who's working on making it exist, people tell me about the chances of successful revival using existing techniques.

I could say the same thing to the FAI effort. Actually, no, I am saying the same thing. Everyone seems to believe that too few people are committed to FAI research, but very few step up to actually volunteer their own efforts, even on a part-time basis, despite much of it still being in the realm of pure mathematics or ethics where you need little more than a good brain, some paper, pens, and lots of spare time to make a possible contribution.

Nu? If everyone has a problem and no-one is doing anything about it... why?

I've had thoughts along similar lines. But it seems like there's a "be consistent about your selfishness" principle at work here. In particular, if...

• ...you are generally willing to spend $X / month for something that has a significant chance of bringing you a very large benefit, like saving your life...
• ...where $X /month is the cost of being signed up for cryonics (organization membership + life insurance)...
• ... and you think cryonics has a significant chance of working...

It seems kind of inconsistent to not be signed up for cryonics.

(Caveat: not sure I can make consistent sense of my preferences involving far-future versions of "me".)

(Disclaimer: I absolutely promise that I am not evil.)

The first one is that I don't actually value my life equally to that of everyone else's life, and that it's inconsistent to appeal to that when I don't appeal to it in my life in general.

Question: why the hell not? My brain processed this kind of question for the first time around fourth grade, when wanting special privileges to go on a field trip with the other kids despite having gotten in trouble. The answer I came up with then is the one I still use now: "why me? Because of Kant's Categorical Imperative" (that is, I didn't want to live in a world where nobody went on the field trip, therefore I should get to go on it -- though this wasn't exactly clear thinking regarding the problem I really had at the time!). I would not want to live in a world where everyone kept their own and everyone else's lifestyle to an absolute minimum in order to act with maximal altruism. Quite to the contrary: I want everyone to have as awesome a life as it is physically feasible for them to have!

I also do give to charity, do pay my taxes, and do support state-run social-welfare programs. So I'm not advocating total selfishness. I'm just proposing a heuristic: before advocating a certain level of altruism, check whether you're ok with that level of altruism becoming a Categorical Imperative, such that the Altruism Fairy brainwashes everyone into that level precisely.

In which case, yes, one should value one's own life over charity levels. After all, it's exactly what the charity recipients will do!

(Again, disclaimer: I swear I'm not evil.)

It feels to me like the general pro-cryo advocacy here would be a bit of a double standard, at least when compared to general memes of effective altruism, shutting up and multiplying, and saving the world.

I think this is why it feels squicky trying to assign a monetary value to my life; part of me thinks it's selfish to assign any more value to my life than Givewell's stated cost to save a stranger's life ($1700-ish??) But I know I value it more than that. I wouldn't risk my life for a paycheck.

The other standard argument is that cryonics doesn't need to come out of my world-saving budget, it can come out of my leisure budget. Which is also true, but it requires that I'm interested enough in cryonics that I get enough fuzzy points from buying cryonics to make up whatever I lose in exchange. And it feels like once you take the leisure budget route, you're implicitly admitting that this is about purchasing fuzzies, not utilons, which makes it a little odd to apply to all those elaborate calculations which are often made with a strong tone of moral obligation. If one is going to be a utilitarian and use the strong tone of moral obligation, one doesn't get to use it to make the argument that one should invest a lot of money on saving just a single person, and with highly uncertain odds at that.

I imagine that a lot of people on Less Wrong get off on having someone tell them "with a strong tone of moral obligation" that death can be defeated and that they simply must invest their money in securing their own immortality. Even if it isn't a valid moral argument, per say, phrasing it as one makes cryonics buyers feel more good about their choice and improves the number of warm fuzzies they get from the thought that some day they'll wake up in the future, alive and healthy with everyone congratulating them on being so very brave and clever and daring to escape death like that.

By going with the leisure budget argument

Should a monk who has taken vows have a sin budget, because the flesh is weak?

You seem conflicted, believing you should not value your own life over others', but continuing to do so; then justifying yielding to temptation on the grounds that you are tempted.

one is essentially admitting that cryonics isn't about altruism, it's about yourself.

Of course it is. Has it ever been presented as anything else, as "Escape death so you can do more for other people"? Support for cryonics is for the sake of everyone, but signing up to it is for oneself alone.

It seems to me that, even valuing your own life and the lives of others equally, it's not necessarily inconsistent to pay much more for cryonics than it would cost to save a life by normal altruist means. Cryonics could save your life, and malaria nets could save somebody else's life, but these two life-savings are not equal. If you're willing to pay more to save a 5-year-old than an 85-year-old, then for some possible values of cryonics effectiveness, expectation of life quality post-resuscitation, and actual cost ratios, shutting up and multiplying could still favor cryonics.

If this argument carries, it would also mean that you should be spending money on buying cryonics for other people, in preference to any other form of altruism. But in practice, you might have a hard time finding people who would be willing to sign up for cryonics and aren't already willing/able to pay for it themselves, so you'd probably have to default back to regular altruism.

If you do have opportunities to buy cryonics for other people, and you value all lives equally, then you've still got the problem of whether you should sign yourself up rather than somebody else. But multiplying doesn't say you can't save yourself first there, just that you have no obligation to do so.

If I value my life equally to the lives of others (...)

Edit: Since you don't in terms of your revealed preferences, are you aspiring to actually reach such a state? Would an equal valuation of your life versus a random other life (say, in terms of QALYs) be a desirable Schelling point, or is "more altruistic" always preferable even at that point (race to the bottom)?

If I get a chance to actually act in accordance to my preferred values and behave more altruistically than normal, I'll take it.

I don't understand this values vs preferred values thing. It sounds like "if I get a chance to go against my actual values in favor of some fictional values, I'll take it" which seems like a painful strategy. If you get to change your values in some direction permanently, it might work and I would understand why you'd want to change your cognition so that altruism felt better, to make your values more consistent.

By going with the leisure budget argument, one is essentially admitting that cryonics isn't about altruism, it's about yourself.

I don't remember any non-crazy cryonics advocate ever saying otherwise.

It feels to me like the general pro-cryo advocacy here would be a bit of a double standard, at least when compared to general memes of effective altruism, shutting up and multiplying, and saving the world. If I value my life equally to the lives of others, it seems pretty obvious that there's no way by which the money spent on cryonics would be a better investment than spending it on general do-gooding.

I think the scale on which it is done is the main thing here. Currently, cryonics is performed so infrequently that there isn't much infrastructure for it. So it is still fairly expensive compared to the amount of expected utility -- probably close to the value implied by regulatory tradeoffs ($5 million per life). On a large, industrial scale I expect it to be far better value than anything Givewell is going to find.

If I value my life equally to the lives of others, it seems pretty obvious that there's no way by which the money spent on cryonics would be a better investment than spending it on general do-gooding.

This just shifts the question to whether promoting cryonics is an effective form of general consequentialist do-gooding. There are a lot of factors to consider, in regards to large-scale cryonics:

1. Effects on funding/enthusiasm for new technologies due to alignment of incentives.
2. Effects on mitigation of existential risks, long-term economic policies, and investments.
3. How much cheaper it gets when practiced on a large industrial scale.
4. How much more reliable it becomes when practiced on a large industrial scale.
5. Displacement of wasteful funeral practices.
6. Displacement of wasteful end-of-life medical practices.
7. Reduced religious fundamentalism, due to less belief in innate immortality.
8. Reduced luxury purchases due to altered time preferences.
9. Relative number of people who could be saved by cryonics but not by any other available technology.

There are some plausible negatives effects to consider as well:

• A larger industry has more opportunities for corruption and mistakes, so it would probably be more regulated on a larger scale, resulting in higher administrative costs and restrictions on experimentation.
• People might be less concerned with preventing some health problems (while being more concerned with others, including traffic fatalities and heart disease) as the result of risk compensation.
• The pressure to cure diseases in the short term could be reduced. Some patients with terminal cases might decide to die earlier than they otherwise would (which would turn out to be permanent if cryonics fails to work for them).

However, the costs aren't likely to outweigh (or even significantly approach) the savings and benefits in my estimation. In many cases the apparent negatives (e.g. people checking out early, or reducing the overt pressure on scientists to cure cancer ASAP) could be a blessing in disguise (less suffering, less bad data). The regulation aspect probably actually benefits from cryonics being a larger and more visible industry, as the alternative is for regulations on the topic to be passed by non-sympathetic outside industries such as death care (funeral directors associations) and tissue banking (nontransplant anatomical donation organizations).

As it stands, LN2 costs of storage are fairly minimal (around $10/year per neuro patient, going by CI figures, or $1000 per patient assuming 1% interest on a long-term deposit), and can be dramatically reduced by larger scale storage spaces. Most of the money is going into standby, administration, equipment, and so forth, which are also likely to be a) scale friendly and b) already heavily invested in by the conventional medical community.

There's also the long-term financial services aspect. A large chunk is going into long-term savings / low-risk investment. My understanding is that this promotes economic growth.

The funds set aside for cryonics reanimation will eventually go to medical research and infrastructure to reanimate patients. This could take more than one form. Programmed nanorepair and/or uploading are the currently expected forms for today's patients, but that expectation does not necessarily hold for all future forms of cryonics. We might, at some point in the next few decades, reduce the brain damage factor to a point where biologically based regenerative techniques (tissue printing, stem cells, synthetic microbes, etc.) are plausible enough on their own. These technologies, or at least the basic science needed to achieve them, would obviously have uses outside the domain of cryonics.

So the direct and indirect results of cryonics seem to me to be good enough that a non-hypocritical EA might plausibly think it is a good idea to promote by whatever means they can. Signing up for it oneself might be useful to boost the credibility of discussing it with friends, especially if you have a social group that includes wealthy people who might donate to cryonics research or assist the transition to a larger infrastructure down the road somewhere. The question is whether this can beat something less expensive like an Adwords campaign of equivalent ongoing cost (say $80/month).

What percent of young people's deaths are cryo-compatible? Hypothetically, if most 70-80 year old people who die are in a hospital bed weeks after a terminal diagnosis, but most 30-40 year old people who die are in a wrecked car with paramedics far away, it might make sense for a 34 year old on the fence to forgo the cryonics membership and extra life insurance now but save the money he would have spent on premiums to sign up later in life.

How do you invest $50,000 to get a 25% chance of increasing everyone's lifespan by 10 years? John Schloendorn himself couldn't do that on $50K.

Reviewing the numbers you made up for sanity is an important part of making decisions after making up numbers.

This math only works if I value a year of someone else's life approximately the same as a year of my life.

If instead I value a year of someone else's life (on average), say, a tenth as much as I value a year of my own life, then if I use your numbers to compare the EV of cryonics at 4 GDY (giga-Dave-years) to the EV of life-extension research at 1.75 GDY, I conclude that cryonics is a better deal.

Approached the other way... if I don't value any given life significantly more than any other, there's no particular reason for me to sign up for cryonics or research life extension. Sure, currently living people will die, but other people will be alive, so the total number of life-years is more or less the same either way... which is what, in this hypothetical, I actually care about. The important thing in that hypothetical is increasing the carrying capacity of the environment, so the population can be maximized.

It turns out to matter what we value.

Cryonics success implies a world where humans are able to do significantly more things than we are now

Not necessarily -- it's possible that an uFAI would revive cryo patients.

Promoting cryonics in my home country doesn't seem like a great career move.

Try promoting rationality instead. If you succeed, then maybe someone else will take care about cryonics And even if they don't, you still did something good.

Excellent point. This isn't a consideration for me right now, but I expect there will be in the future.

But the value of your life in comparison to other persons lifes doesn't change by this. You'd have to inflation-adjust the value of other persons lifes accordingly.

Only if you are not valuing other persons lifes can you get away with this, but the OP made sufficiently clear that this wasn't the case.

It's reasonable to believe that the area under the curve with "QALYs of life" on the X axis and "Probability of having a life this good or better, given cryonics" is finite, even if there is no upper bound on lifespan. Given a chance of dying each year that has a lower bound, due to accident, murder, or existential hazard, I think that it is provable that the total expected lifetime is finite.

You make a good point that the expected lifetime of a successfully revived cryonicist might be more valuable than the life of someone who didn't sign up.

It's neutral from a point of pleasure vs suffering for the dead person

It forgets opportunity costs. Dying deprive the person of all the future experience (s)he could have, so of a huge amount of pleasure (and potentially suffering too).

I feel like being revived in the future would be a new project I am not yet emotionally committed to.

I think I would be / will be very motivated to extend my life, but when it comes to expending effort to "come back", I realize I feel some relief with just letting my identity go.

The main reason behind this is that what gives my life value are my social connections, without them I am just another 'I', no different than any other. It seems just as well that there be another, independent birth than my own revival. One reason I feel this way is from reading books -- being the 'I' in the story always feels the same.

This would all of course change if my family was signing up.

Would you like to live forever?

For just 50$ monthly fee, agents of Time Patrol Institute promise to travel back in time extract your body a few miliseconds before death. In order to avoid causing temporal "parodxes", we pledge to replace your body with (almost) identical artificially constructed clone. After your body is extracted and moved to closest non-paradoxical future date we will reverse damage caused by aging, increase your lifespan to infinity and treat you with a cup of coffee.

While we are fully aware that time travel is not yet possible, we believe that recent advances in nanotechnology and quantum physics, matched by your generous donations would hopefully allow us to construct a working time machine at any point in the future.

Why not Cryonics?

For all effective altruists in the audience, please consider that utility of immortalizing entire humankind is preferable to saving only those few of us who underwent cryonic procedures. If you don't sign your parents for temporal rescue, you are a lousy son. People who tell you otherwise are simply voicing their internalized deathist-presentists prejudices.

For selfish practically minded agents living in the 2014, please consider that while in order for you to benefit from cryonics it is mandatory that correct brain preservation techniques are developed and popularized during your lifespan, time travel can be developed at any point in the future, there is no need for hurry.

Regards, Blaise Pascal, CEO of TPI

Someone who dies in a hospital and has had an autopsy couldn't be rescued without changing the past.

Why not? Just replace them with a remote-controlled clone, or upload them from afar (using magic, obviously), or rewrite everyone's memories of you ...

As a general note I'd urge you to question the probabilities you took from Will Cryonics Work as those numbers seem to lack references (to me the look made up esp. because the are not qualified by e.g. a time until revive) and they are from a pro-cryonics site.

Yes. My calculations are lazy. I cobbled together the ideas of this post in a conversation that took place when I was supposed to be sleeping, and when I wrote it a few days later, it was by carving 2 hours out after my bedtime. Which won't be happening again tonight because I can only work so many 12 hour shifts on five hours of sleep a night. The alternative wasn't doing better calculations; it was not doing any calculations at all and sticking with my bottom line that cryonics doesn't feel like something I want to do, just because.

Also: the reason I posted this publically almost as soon as I had the thought of writing it at all was to get feedback. So thank you. I will hopefully read through all the feedback and take it into account the next time I would rather do that than sleeping.

Which causes me to think if another argument: if you attach a high probability to an Ultra-AI which doesn't quite have a perfectly aligned utility function, do you want to be brought back into a world which has or could have an UFAI?

I don't think it would make much difference.

Consider my comment in Hallquist's thread:

AI singularity won't affects points 1 and 2: If information about your personality has not been preserved, there is nothing an AI can do to revive you.

It might affect points 3 and 4, but to a limited extent: an AI might be better than vanilla humans at doing research, but it would not be able to develop technologies which are impossible or intrinsically impractical for physical reasons. A truly benevolent AI might be more motivated to revive cryopatients than regular people with selfish desires, but it would still have to allocate its resources economically, and cryopatient revival might not be the best use of them.

Points 5 and 6: clearly the sooner the super-duper AI appears and develops revival tech, the higher the probability that your cryoremains are still around, but super AI appearing early and developing revival tech soon is less probable than it appearing late and/or taking a long time to develop revival tech, hence I would think that the two effects roughly cancel out. Also, as other people have noted, super AI appearing and giving you radical life extension within your lifetime would make cryonics a waste of money.

More generally, I think that AI singularity is itself a conjunctive event, with the more extreme and earlier scenarios being less probable than the less extreme and later ones. Therefore I don't think that taking into accounts AIs should significantly affect any estimation of cryonics success.

How do you factor in uFAI or other bad revival scenarios?

I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't see a contradiction. Believing that a living brain's data can be successfully uploaded eventually doesn't imply that the same data can necessarily be uploaded from a brain preserved with current-day tech. The usual line I see quoted is that cryonics tech isn't guaranteed to preserve key data, but it has a higher chance than rot-in-a-box tech or burn-to-ash tech.

Here is a parable illustrating relevant difficulty of both problems:

*Imagine you are presented with a modern manuscript in latin and asked to retype it on a computer and translate everything into English.

This is how uploading more or less looks like for me, data is there but it still needs to be understood, and copied. Ah, you also need a computer. Now consider the same has to be done with ancient manuscript, that has been preserved in a wooden box stored in ice cave and guarded by a couple of hopeful monks:

• Imagine the manuscript has been preserved using correct means and all letters are still there.

Uploading is easy. There is no data loss, so it is equivalent to uploading modern manuscript. This means that monks were smart enough to choose optimal storage procedure (or got there by accident) - very unlikely.

• Imagine the manuscript has been preserved using decent means and some letters are still there.

Now, we have to do a bit of guesswork... is the manuscript we translate the same thing original author had in mind? EY called it doing intelligent cryptography on a partially preserved brain, as far as I am aware. Monks knew just enough not to screw up the process, but their knowledge of manuscript-preservation-techniques was not perfect.

• Imagine the manuscript has been preserved using decent means all traces have vanished without trace.

Now we are royally screwed, or we can wait a couple of thousands of millions years so that oracle computer can deduce state of manuscript by reversing entropy. This means monks know very little about manuscript-preservation.

• Imagine there is no manuscript. There is a nice wooden box preserved with astonishing details, but manuscript have crumbled when monks put it inside.

Well, the monks who wanted to preserve manuscript didn't know that preserving the box does not help to preserve the manuscript, but they tried, right? This means monks don't understand connection between manuscript and box preservation techniques.

• Imagine there is no manuscript. The box has been damaged as well.

This is what happens when manuscript-preservation business is run by people with little knowledge about what should be done to store belongings for thousands of years without significant damage.

In other words, uploading is something that can be figured out correctly in far, far future while the problem of what is proper cryo-storage has to be solved correctly right now as incorrect procedure may lead to irreversible loss of information for people who want to be preserved now. I don't assign high prior probability to the fact that we know enough about the brain to preserve minds correctly, and therefore cryonics in the current shape or form is unlikely to succeed.

Is murder bad, on your view?
If so, why?

Assuming your life has non-infinitesimal positive value to you, even if losing one year of life would be a minor loss, losing some large number of years would be an enormous loss. Given that you'd be alive if you wouldn't die, you lose a lot from death.

This is nonsensical. Even if you're right, then most people who don't want cryonics are just mistaken about the probability of success. Being mistaken about something cannot be either suicidal (in the ordinary sense) or selfish, since both of those require conscious decisions.

If you think a bridge is safe, drive over it, and fall through to your death, was your decision to drive over the bridge "selfish"? Of course not. It caused pain and grief for the survivors, but not knowingly.

PS: What's your estimate of the probability of success for being rescued by time travellers if you make sure you die in a closed vault so you can be rescued without changing the past?

85%? Seriously???

The near-certain impossibility of anything resembling the molecular nanotechnology favored on that page alone blows that out of the water as does the severe apparent institutional incompetence of cryonics providers.

deciding against cryonics [..] causes pain and grief for the survivors

I don't expect that my friends and loved ones will experience less pain and grief when I stop breathing, talking, thinking, etc. if my brain has been cryopreserved against a possible future when its information-theoretical content can be extracted and those functions re-enabled, than if it hasn't been.

So if my deciding against cryonics is selfish, it is not for this reason.