On the unpopularity of cryonics: life sucks, but at least then you die

I was reading a prediction from fifty years ago or so that by 2000, people would only work a few hours a day or a few days a week, because most work would be computerized/roboticized and technology would create amazing wealth. Most work has been computerized/roboticized, technology has created amazing wealth, but working conditions are little better, and maybe worse, than they were fifty years ago.

Technological advances can't shorten the work hours because even in a society wealthy and technologically advanced enough that basic subsistence is available for free, people still struggle for zero-sum things, most notably land and status. Once a society is wealthy enough that basic subsistence is a non-issue, people probably won't work as much as they would in a Malthusian trap where constant toil is required just to avoid starvation, but they will still work a lot because they're locked in these zero-sum competitions.

What additionally complicates things is that habitable land is close to a zero-sum resource for all practical purposes, since to be useful, it must be near other people. Thus, however wealthy a society gets, for a typical person it always requires a whole lot of work to be able to afford decent lodging, and even though starvation is no longer a realistic danger for those less prudent and industrious in developed countries, homelessness remains so.

There is also the problem of the locked signaling equilibrium. Your work habits have a very strong signaling component, and refusing to work the usual expected hours strongly signals laziness, weirdness, and issues with authority, making you seem completely useless, or worse.

As for working conditions, in terms of safety, cleanliness, physical hardship, etc., typical working conditions in developed countries are clearly much better than fifty years ago. What arguably makes work nowadays worse is the present distribution of status and the increasing severity of the class system, which is a very complex issue tied to all sorts of social change that have occurred in the meantime. But this topic is probably too ideologically sensitive on multiple counts to discuss productively on a forum like LW.

Work is terrible, and the lives of many working people, even people with "decent" jobs in developed countries, are barely tolerable. It is currently socially unacceptable to mention this. Anyone who breaks that silence has done a good deed.

How confident are you that this reflects the experience of working people rather than how you would feel if you were in their position?

I've wondered about this a lot myself. Note along with figure 3 of the quoted article, according to a Gallup poll the average self reported life satisfaction in America is around 7/10. Presumably this average includes even including the sick/elderly/poor. I believe that my own self reported life satisfaction would be considerably lower than that if I were living the life of an average American.

I would guess that the difference is mostly accounted for by my own affective response to a given situation diverging heavily from the affective response that members of the general population would have in the same situation.

The prospect of an hansonain future does seem like a pretty good reason to delete all records of yourself, dispose of anyone with significant memories of you, and incinerate your brain in a large explosion enough to spread the ashes of your brain for miles around. At sea.

Work is terrible, and the lives of many working people, even people with "decent" jobs in developed countries, are barely tolerable. It is currently socially unacceptable to mention this.

I've been wondering why no one has yet broached this issue on LW, that I recall.

summary of the article was much better than the article itself, which was cluttered with lots of quotes and pictures and lengthiness. Summaries that are better than the original articles are hard to do, hence, upvote.

It's not very hard to do when the original author is Mike Darwin. The man really needs an editor. Consider "Doing the Time Wrap", which looks for all the world like someone wrote 2 or 3 amazing, wonderful essays on completely different topics, and then decided to cut and paste random sections of them to form a single article, with random song lyrics thrown in for good measure.

Rationality Bootcamp and Advanced Sanity Techniques? The first things sane and rational people do, are to exercise due diligence in gathering the facts before they make crazy and unfounded public statements such as:

1) "I suspect that Mike Darwin wants a grand narrative of Why, Oh Why Cryonics Fails, a grand narrative that makes sense of this shocking and incomprehensible fact and gives some info on what needs to be done to relieve the frustration." and

2) "Mike Darwin thinks that if you have better preservation techniques, people will sign up in droves, because right now they're hearing about cryonics and rejecting it because the preservation techniques aren't good enough."

Really? Not only don't I believe those things to be true, I've never said that they were. Au contraire, the only grand narrative of why people haven't embraced cryonics in droves is a very complicated one which, onto 40 years later, I'm still learning about and struggling to fully understand. In 1981 I wrote an article (with Steve Bridge) entitled "The Bricks in the Wall" about the many reasons why people find it difficult to embrace cryonics: http://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics8111.txt. If I recall correctly, there were at least a dozen reasons given in that essay, including things like loss of others, loss of self, lack of technical confidence, incompatible worldview, high social cost, fear of temporal displacement... Since that article was written, I've learned of many more reasons why people reject cryonics and why they don't decide to opt for it - which, as it turns out, can be two very different things.

Ironically, much of my career in cryonics has been spent arguing against "the big idea," "the grand solution," "the magic bullet," or "the single rich individual who will provide the solution to the problem of why cryonics has fared so poorly." There is no single reason, unless you want to consider the myriad individual reasons, in aggregate, as a single cause of the failure. If you insist on that approach, then the best you will do (and you could do far worse) is to note that by any normal market standards, cryonics is a shitty product. It costs a lot, it is unproven, there are many commonplace reasons to believe that existing institutional structures have a poor chance of surviving long enough for the patients to be recovered, it has been plagued by legitimate scandals and failures and the constraints imposed by the existing medico-legal infrastructure mean that, statistically, you've got a ~30% chance of being autopsied, or otherwise so badly degraded that whoever it is that is recovered from the procedure isn't very likely to be you (e.g., presumably if your DNA is intact a clone could be made). So cryonics doesn't stack up very well as a normal market product.

Having said that, if you want to 'sell' cryonics as part of brainwashing package, or a religion, I'd be the first to say that it can probably done. It has been my observation that you can get people to do almost anything if you rob them of their will, and subvert their reason. For myself, I don't think that's a good idea.

As to the issue of improved preservation techniques causing people to sign up in droves, surely you jest? Any improvement in cryopreservation techniques short of fully reversible suspended animation will 'only' have an incremental effect. So for example, if organ cryopreservation for the kidney were achieved tomorrow, and organ banks for kidneys opened their doors 6 months later, I would indeed expect to see an increase in people opting for cryonics, but not a stampede.

Historically, the same was true of the introduction into cryonics of credible ideas for repairing cryoinjury and of scientific documentation that brain ultrastructure was surviving cryopreservation (under ideal conditions) reasonably well. Both of those advances widened the appeal of cryonics to a very small group of people. Nevertheless, they were significant, because if you have 40 members, and such advances give you 240, or a 1,040 - then that's a huge benefit.

Finally, if reversible whole body suspended animation were developed tomorrow, the vast majority of people would still not opt for it. In fact, they more or less never would. What would have to happen first is that a relatively small cohort of the population who command respect, authority and power, would have to decide that it is in their interest to have suspended animation become a commonplace medical treatment. By this, I do not mean to imply some focused or intelligent cabal, or group of conspirators, but rather that all kinds of empowered people in many walks of life must be persuaded before the society at large will embrace cryonics. In other words, it will be a process and probably a complex one, before Mrs. Smith sits in her doctor's office and is either offered, or asks about, suspended animation as a possible alternative to her ending up dead from her advanced ovarian cancer.

In my opinion there are no magic bullets. Rather, there are just a lot bricks in a large wall of opposition that have to be patiently worried away, one, or a few at a time. It's all too easy to see TV coverage of the Berlin Wall coming down and say, "Jeeze, look how quick and easy that was!" Not. The back-story needs to be considered and in the case of cryonics that back-story has been unfolding for nearly fifty years - and there are still less than 2K people signed up worldwide.

Finally, it is indeed a cruel and unpleasant reality that life isn't very rewarding for many people, and that it all but completely lacks the zest, joy and wonderful sense of adventure that can be seen in the eyes of any well cared for child. The biology of maturation and aging do much to drain away that sense of wonder and appetite for life. But it is much more likely the case that the way we lead our lives is the primary culprit. I recommend watching multiple episodes of a TV program called "Undercover Boss." Just watch what people who work in factories, in offices, in laundries and in loo cleaning businesses do all day. It is horrible. It is, in fact, the exact opposite of the situation we DEMAND that children be in. Indeed, one of the most repellant things to people in the West is "child labor." Well, if the normal workaday work is so horrible for children, what makes it good for adults? And if we propose to live for millennia, and longer, then don't we, by definition, have to be as children: open, mobile, playful and exploring in our interaction with the world? I have done all kinds of jobs, from working at Mc Donald's (2 years) to cleaning loos and dirty motel rooms. Work is a good and character building thing. But it can also be a corrosive and soul destroying thing that robs people of any strong desire to fight for life. Methinks that perhaps you need to work at McDonald's dressing hamburger buns for a year or two.

The truth is that people aren't anything like coherent enough to refuse cryonics for a reason like that.

I agree with almost all of what you say about no grand narrative and mostly just conformity, but I'm not willing to entirely dismiss this explanation as even a small part of the puzzle. It doesn't seem much different than the theories that poor people with few life prospects have higher temporal discount rates and are more likely to engage in risky/criminal behavior because they have less to protect. People aren't coherent enough to think "Well, stealing this watch has a small probability of landing me in prison, but my life now isn't so satisfying, so I suppose it's worth the risk, and I suppose it's worth risking a lot later for a small gain now since I currently have so little", but there's some inner process that gives more or less that result.

If even the few people who get past the weirdness factor flinch away from the thought of actually being alive more, I expect that would make a significant difference.

I'm going to try a test question that might differentiate between "cryonics sounds weird" and "I don't like life enough to want to live even more" on my blog. Obviously no one from here post on that since you already know where it's going.

If you want people to sign up for cryonics, the method with by far the strongest conversion ratio is to train them from scratch in advanced sanity techniques.

Alternate hypotheses: your followers are mostly technophile singularitarians, and technophile singularitarians are attracted to cryonics independently of rationalist training. Your followers believe there may be a positive singularity, which means the future has a reason to be much better than the present and avoid the unpleasantness Darwin describes in the article. Your followers are part of maybe the one community on earth, outside the cryonics community itself, where the highest-status figures are signed up for cryonics and people are often asked to justify why they have not done so. Your followers are part of a community where signing up for cryonics signals community affiliation. Your followers have actually heard the arguments in favor of cryonics and seen intelligent people take them seriously, which is more than 99.9% of people can say.

I recently got a phone call saying that, if I recall correctly, around a quarter - or maybe it was half - of all Alcor's cryonics signups this year, are originating from LW/Yudkowsky/rationality readers. If you want people to sign up for cryonics, the method with by far the strongest conversion ratio is to train them from scratch in advanced sanity techniques.

Your conclusion doesn't follow from your premise. Moreover I don't know what you mean by "advanced sanity techniques." I agree that you've probably increased to number of cryonics signups substantially but I doubt that increased rationality has played a significant role.

Cryonics sounds strange and not-of-our-tribe and they don't see other people doing it, a feeling expressed in words as "weird". It's perceptually categorized as similar to religions or other scams they've heard about from the newspaper, based purely on surface features and without any reference to, or remediability by, the strength of the underlying logic; that's never checked

If you want people to sign up for cryonics, the method with by far the strongest conversion ratio is to train them from scratch in advanced sanity techniques.

The implication of the latter quote is that the sanity techniques are being applied, and cryonics is being signed up for largely because of its merits.

I think that the former quote captures more of what is going on. A community is being created in which cryonics isn't as weird, removing previous barriers without implicating rationality directly.

I have a testable prediction that can partially parse out at least one factor. One disproportionately powerful influence on human beings in addition to (and mutually reinforcing) group think/behavior is accepting authority. (It is true that what others do is valid evidence for the validity of what they are doing, and is greater evidence the more the other(s) resemble(s) (an) optimal reasoning system(s) and is/are informed,)

I predict that if/as it becomes better known that Eliezer Yudkowsky signed up with the Cryonics Institute and not Alcor, the ratio of people signing up with Alcor and citing LW/HPATMOR to the people signing up with the Cryonics Institute and citing LW/HPATMOR will decrease.

If you want people to sign up for cryonics, the method with by far the strongest conversion ratio is to train them from scratch in advanced sanity techniques.

With all due respect, where's the evidence that reading LW/HPMOR trains people in advanced sanity techniques?

It seems reasonably plausible that, for example, Harry's argument with Dumbledore primes people toward "death is bad". If they hang around long enough and read what LW has to say about cryonics, that priming tends some fraction of those people toward subscribing to cryonics, without them learning anything about e.g. Bayes' law.

But I don't know, I don't know the numbers. What's the readership of HPMOR versus Alcor's 2011 signups?

I've been really impressed by the focused cross-pollination between transhumanism and rationality that I see at LW. I am not sure I would agree that increased individual rationality is the direct cause of increased cryonics signups because there are other explanations which seem more likely. As others have noted, this is a rare community where it is not weird, and is highly esteemed, to be signed up for cryonics.

And since humans are (at least in many situations) motivated by social factors more than abstract rational considerations, I expect the social factors to have more explanatory weight. That isn't to say cryonics is not more rational than the alternative of no cryonics! More like this community is one that tries (i.e. individuals are rewarded for trying) to build its standards on rationality, and reject standards which aren't, and cryonics is able to survive that process. If there were something grossly irrational or unethical about cryonics (as is commonly contended), it would not be able to survive very easily in the memesphere of lesswrong.

But this brings us back to the concept of "advanced" rationality. If you can a) keep your community continually pruned of bad ideas by shooting them down with the strongest logic available (and rewarding this behavior when it crops up), and b) let that community's norms dominate your decisions when they are strongly rationally grounded, the outcome is that you will be a more rational person in terms of decisions made. This is not less valid from the perspective of "rationality = winning" than divorcing yourself from social impulses and expending loads of willpower to contradict the norm.

It sometimes seems to me that many Lesswrongers seriously underestimate the degree to which they need to first persuade the skeptical to adopt transhumanism/singulatarianism more generally before cryonics is actually going to appear rational to them.

Revival from cryonics that involved growing a new biological body using the original DNA would have the broadest appeal, but accepting this conception of cryonics requires convincing people either a)that we are going to solve our topsoil and other issues that would actually allow us to feed the exploding biological population that would result from mass use of cryonics or b)people should stop having children, neither of which people are likely to accept unless they're already inclined to singulatarianism (for a) or transhumanism (for b).

Revival from cryonics with a cybernetic body is going to seem less appealing to most people unless they've already been convinced that a number of things that are currently inherent in being human are not actually essential to their identity. Revival as an emulation faces the same problem to a vastly greater degree.

TL;DR version – Not accepting transhumanism might be irrational. Not accepting cryonics given that one is not already a transhumanist – not irrational. Lesswrongers should plan their outreach accordingly.

I think this is a good point, but perhaps followers of Lesswrong are signing up for cryonics for basically the same reason ordinary people are not. i.e. it's what high status members of their group do.

Remember the fraction of people that take $500 for certain over a 15% chance of $1 million?

Wow. I don't think I'd heard that one.

Another painful statistic I ran into during some terrorism research: in investigating US Army personnel choosing between large lump sums and pensions ($25,000-$50,000 range): pg 48 of http://www.rau.ro/intranet/Aer/2001/9101/91010033.pdf

Enlisted personnel who were planning on leaving had a nominal discount rate of 57.2%.

How far up in "advanced sanity techniques" do I have to go before I become a Clear and can learn about Xenu and the body thetans?

I like that theory of Vassar's because it fits my personal experience.

I was raised in an extremely religious household which caused me to miss out on advanced education. The internet has alleviated that to a degree, but the credentialed part certainly hasn't been alleviated. By the time I "woke up" from the indoctrination of being raised in such a religious household, I was already approaching 30 years old and relatively unwealthy while at the same time being stuck with the work skills I was taught while growing up...that is construction and remodeling of homes. While I have made the best of that by being self-employed, it certainly has kept me from doing what I really would like to do when I "grow up".

The internet has really been a boon for me as I self educated in software development and am slowly working to transition over to making my living from doing that. That's closer to what I would rather do, but I doubt I'll ever be able to get to the point where I can do what I really would love (research in any of the scientific fields I'm interested in...CS/medicine/AI/physics). At times this can be quite depressing and it feels like the person I was, was wasted.

However, all this makes me more of a fan of cryonics. Second chances and all that.

Cryogenics pretty much isn't AVAILABLE in most of Europe. Not at a price, acceptability, or reliability comparable to the US at least.

Probably false.

People don't find flimsy excuses to refuse conventional life-saving treatments, and non-conventional treatments can become conventional (say, antibiotics). This holds, though less so, even if the treatments cost quality of life and money.

I didn't start out liking life, but I seem to be very atypical in that regard (often suffer from anhedonia, for example). But it's more likely that I've moved away from the norm, not toward it, especially since I'm bad at distinguishing norms for X from norms for "X"... shudder

Scary. Someone please disprove this.

That logic only holds if there's no cost, or no alternate investment. Currently the cost of cryonics is ~$28,000. If I donated that to GiveWell instead, I'd be saving ~28 lives. The question of whether I want to be immortal or save 28 mortal lives, is not one I've seen much addressed, and not one that I've yet found a satisfying answer to.

I've given it a lot of thought, and this does appear to be my True Rejection of Cryonics; if I can find a satisfying reasoning to value my immortality over those 28 mortal lives, I'd sign up.

Growing up religious I assumed I'd have a second different (not necessarily better), chance at life, that wouldn't have an expiration date. As I grew up I saw the possibility grew more distant and less probable in my mind.

I still feel entitled to at least get a try at a second one. Also for the past few years I generally feel much of the things I vaule will be lost and destroyed and that they are probably objectively out of my reach to try and save. So perhaps a touch of megalomania also plays a role or maybe I just want to be the guy to scream:

"YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! OH, DAMN YOU! GODDAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!"

That's an interesting point. I am signed up for cryonics, but I'm actually rather ambivalent about my life. One major wrinkle is that, if cryonics does succeed, it would almost certainly have to be in a scenario where aging was solved by necessary precursor technologies. For me, a large chunk of my ambivalence is simply the anticipated decline in health as I age. By the same token, existential risks that might prevent me from, for instance, living from age 75 to age 85 tend not to worry me much.

It could also be a revealed preference that they don't like life enough to give their fate completely into the hands of unknown future people, or simply that they don't think the probability of successful cryonics + a good future is high enough to justify the costs.

Actually, when you put the argument for cryonics like this, it kind of sounds like a version of Pascal's Mugging. Perhaps we could call this: Pascal's Benefactor.

Consider Eliezer's "proof" that he wants to live forever: "I want to live one more day. Tomorrow I will still want to live one more day. Therefore I want to live forever, proof by induction on the positive integers."

The breakdown, of course, is the belief that all tomorrows are the same. Some people realise that youth is temporary, and so don't look forward too much to being 70, because as infirmities crop up life gets less pleasant until they could take it or leave it. So, they like life- when life is good, and realize that life won't always be good. They also view life extension in terms of time-discounted pleasure, and so if they have to regularly starve themselves in order to live longer when they're 70, they won't because overall life pleasure will be lower.

You are not alone.

Are the rest of my compatriots so eager to die?

For many reasons, revealed preferences point to the answer being "yes", if for some reason you want to model humans as rational.

Even less alone.

The natural response is to seek devastating arguments or just blurt out: "What makes you so special?"

A common reaction; I was reading up on the hostile wife phenomenon for a mini-essay on cryonics, and the quote from Robin Hanson's wife was quite striking (https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/magazine/11cryonics-t.html):

“You have to understand,” says Peggy, who at 54 is given to exasperation about her husband’s more exotic ideas. “I am a hospice social worker. I work with people who are dying all the time. I see people dying All. The. Time. And what’s so good about me that I’m going to live forever?”

(As one commentator on, I think, Katja Grace's blog said - what's so bad about you that you should die?)

a form of slavery

Eliezer has said something wise on exactly this point...somewhere. It is somewhat in contention with what you say here, or at least how you say it.

If your foundational principle that you program into in AI is that slavery is bad, taxes become impossible to collect.

So arguing against something by saying that it is qualitatively slavery is suspect, akin to arguing against food because it is qualitatively cyanide. An argument against apples should have to enumerate the quantity of cyanide in the pits and the lethal dose to humans.

I'd rather say current work conditions have specific negative qualities, or if the best way to bring them to mind is with "slavery", then be careful to say it is bad because it is too much slavery, rather than bad because it is slavery.

Edit: it was Yvain who said it here

Unless lack of existential happiness is considered as a factor in determining public perception of immortality and cryonics. Existentially happy people then make decisions based on that public perception.

I think refusals come from people not foreseeing returning to their set points (like they overestimate the benefits of winning the lottery). As of right now, I don't think Ebert needs willpower, or even thinks "Darn, this sucks" whenever he has to do something related to his disabilities.

Anyone who bothered to wake you up would almost certainly do something such as be nice to you, callously use you as primary source grist for historical research, or torture you for amusement. Possibly, things would have changed so much that being nice to you wouldn't work (e.g., none of your friends are revived, your significant other was revived along with married partners of five or so permutations of physical sexual configurations and orientations, etc.

It's unlikely anyone would revive you to do the same ol', same ol'.

Women with a high hereditary risk of breast cancer sometimes opt to have both their breasts removed pre-emptively. People take statins and blood pressure drugs for years to prevent heart attacks. Don't you have eye tests and dental checkups on a precautionary basis? There's plenty of preventative medical care.

Maybe the availability and marketing varies between countries - the fact that you assume people have to invest their own money to ensure their health suggests you're from the US or another country with a bad healthcare system. My country has a national health service which takes an interest in encouraging preventative medicines like statins, helping people give up smoking, and so on, since that saves it money overall. I'm sure the allocation of preventative care is far from ideal and shaped by political and social factors and drug company lobbying, but it does exist.

It would be a bad tradeoff to go through painful appendectomy to prevent the small chance that you might get appendicitis (and you can get your appendix removed when it's actually infected, and the appendix may have an evolutionary function acting as a reservoir of gut bacteria, and it can also be used to reconstruct the bladder).

That's interesting about not letting yourself feel too happy. Is preventing a rude shock which may not happen (you could die suddenly or anti-aging tech could be developed) worth putting the brakes on feeling happy?

I've realized that one reason [1] I don't reliably allow coordinated joint mobility in T'ai Chi is that it doesn't feel natural/allowable for me to feel that good. I'm not sure what's behind that.

[1] The other reason is that it takes a lot of mental focus to change movement habits.

Would it have no cost to me and humankind, I would sign up. But given the resources required, I don't think anyone should do it (in the same way that I don't think anyone should drive a Hummer in a city).

Would it change your mind if the resource cost per person goes down the more people do it? That is something that is not true of people driving a Hummer -- or burial in a graveyard for that matter.

It's a well documented trend that criminals in jail for committing more serious crimes, especially the sociopaths and murderers, are generally of higher average individual intelligence (as measured by things like IQ tests) compared with the local population in which they live. And that's just the criminals that get convicted. (Although street crime, on the other hand, tends to have bellow-average IQ perpetrators.)

Studies have also found that areas with populations of lower average intelligence tend to have more crime, but that's a very different statement entirely.

The reason I haven’t posted here before is that I’ve had no burning reason to, and I’m busy.

While there are many discrete reasons why cryonics hasn’t been (more) successful, the single biggest reason is the most obvious one; it has not been demonstrably shown to work. If suspended animation were a demonstrated reality tomorrow, and it was affordable (i.e., not like spaceflight, which is demonstrably workable, but not yet affordable) then the tide would be turned. Even then, it is unlikely there would be any kind of flash-stampede to the freezers.

A schoolmate and friend of mine just died a few weeks ago of pulmonary fibrosis. He was an ideal candidate for a lung transplant. But, he couldn’t afford it, so he just laid there and died. Thousands of people who need transplants die each year, even though it is a proven modality of treatment that is yielding a significant number of quality years of life. But, it is costly, there aren’t enough donors, and here’s the really remarkable thing, the vast majority of people who could benefit from a transplant are never even candidates.

Consider Richard DeVos, the co-founder of Amway: http://www.rickross.com/reference/amway/amway24.html. In 1983 DeVos, suffering from coronary artery disease, had bypass surgery. In 1992 DeVos had another bypass surgery, and by 1995 it was clear he had end stage congestive heart failure (CHF). How many people have you known or heard about who fit that description, and subsequently go on to die a perfectly pedestrian death; at home or in the ICU? Such deaths are so routine no one gives them a second thought.

And it’s for damn sure that no one gives them a second thought when the patient is a 71 year old man! However, if you are absolutely fixated on staying alive, and your net worth is well in excess of 2 billion 1997 dollars, well, the rules of the game are different for you. DeVos got his heart in London, and the Amway corporate jet flew him there from Grand Rapids, MI. That was in 1997, and as far as I know, DeVos is still alive. There are countless ~71 year old men in the US, and elsewhere in the Developed World, dying of CHF right now. In those cases, the word "transplant" is neither uttered nor heard – even though it is very much a reality that if you have the money, the persistence and the luck – a heart transplant offers the prospect of another 5 years of reasonably good quality life, on average.

I worked in hospital, mostly in critical care medicine, for 7 years. The overwhelming majority of patients are passive – they do what their physicians advise and if they do have alternative ideas, they are usually easily dissuaded from pursuing them. And, truth to tell, most of the “alternative ideas” patients have are bad ones, including Steve Jobs. But, if you are smart, lucky and rich – and you come to your senses, as Jobs did, it can be whole other ball game. Jobs suffered recurrent pancreatic cancer (islet cell neuroendocrine tumor) after a Whipple procedure in 2004. That is just about as close as you can get to a death sentence, since the usual location of the met(s) is the liver. It is current medical consensus that liver transplantation in patients with recurrent pancreatic cancer that has metastasized to the liver is contraindicated. In fact, I know a couple of transplant surgeons who call such a procedure a murderous waste of a liver, and a life! However, Jobs got a liver transplant in 2009. I strongly suspect that he has very recently received additional cutting edge treatment not widely available.

Cryopreservation/cryonics is likely to creep in on little cat’s feet – with a big jump or two along the way. Cryobanking of parenchymatous organs will probably be one jump, reversible cryopreservation of the brain another, and finally, whole body suspended animation. But it behooves us to beware that lots and lots of people are “calmly” accepting their fates today, who could in fact be ‘rescued’ by already extant medical technology - but for the knowledge, the money and the will. And THAT is what is NOT likely to change. To a surprising degree, people stay alive because it has been made very easy for them to do so. Make it difficult, and you start to see people dropping away.

Cryonics demands a very high passion for and commitment to staying alive, not just because it is currently such a lousy product, but because, to be really credible, it DEMANDS ACTION to improve the odds of its success. Most people are not activists, and what's more, most people will refuse a chance at more life when you take away the superficial things that they mistake for their person-hood, or identity. And cryonics proposes to do exactly that. There is historical precedent for this. In his incredibly insightful book, MAN'S SEARCH FOR MEANING, Viktor Frankl noted that the people in the Nazi concentration camps fell into two groups. The first group consisted of the majority of those interned there, and they were people who defined themselves in terms of their social milieu: if you asked them who they were, they would say, "I am a doctor, a lawyer, a mother..." The second group consisted of a small minority of people who thought of themselves as existing completely independent of any label, any role, or any relationship they had with others, or with society.

When you entered a concentration camp, they took away you clothes, your profession, your family and even your name. For most people, that was the equivalent of taking away their very identity, and thus their will to live. As Frankel observed, it was mostly only the people in second, much smaller group, that survived.

It is from that tiny minority in the population as a whole, that cryonics draws it adherents. They are people who want to live, regardless, and who do not define their sense of self on the basis of their jobs, their social interactions, or really, on anything other than a raw, visceral passion to survive. Some find that absolutely terrifying.

This was the first time I have seen Darwin's blog and it ate up much of my afternoon.

I'm glad to hear that; that was one of the goals - to introduce LW to Darwin a bit.

Does Darwin ever post on LessWrong, and if not I would be curious why not?

LW is a very recent thing. Darwin got involved in cryonics in, like, the 1960s. It's not surprising if, as he began polishing and dumping online what sometimes feels like decades of material, he didn't do so on some popular new transhumanist website; so there may be nothing there to explain. If there was, it may be that Darwin differs philosophically from LW in general (certainly Yudkowsky has vociferously criticized the excerpted post).

& then I found this on Darwin's site:

google ngram research on cryonics

Specifically he has a graph of "cryonics" (the word) citations in all periodicals scanned by google up to February 2011 versus time and it appears the most talked about item in the history of cryonics, ever, may well be Ted Williams's frozen head. He has a photograph of Williams in his article.

(& also I had never heard of this google ngram thing before and it looks remarkable.)

I have it from a good source that a famous inventor may sign up. (No, not that one.) If he follows through and goes into suspension before I do, I will wear a denim shirt to mark the occasion.

Many important people have been offered no-cost cryopreservation and rejected it, the most relevant of which is the sci-fi author who had written books about cryopreservation.

That's a Nas sample. You might like Illmatic.

My own aged parents have put a very lot of effort into not getting killed by COVID this year, but they're resistant to the idea of cryonics to the point where I've stopped badgering them about it. They actually believe me that it might work, they just don't want to live forever. 

The best argument I can get out of them is that the idea of living forever 'seems a bit American'. 

I'm not sure if this comment will stand for long here, because the questions I'm about to ask are probably mostly of interest just to me.

Christina, wen you say you'd be more interested in funding "life extension research,"(LER), I'd like to know what your vision of LER is, specifically? What kinds of technologies do you think realistically offer you a chance at indefinitely, or even moderately extending your healthy lifespan? When do you think they might be available, and with what restrictions (if any) and at what likely cost? How long do you think it is likely that advances in LER will be able to extend your lifespan - including as incremental bridges to increasingly better technologies? Finally, how much of your income are you currently contributing to LER, and if I could ask, to what kinds of LER are you contributing money?

Many thanks. I'm really quite interested in the answers to these questions.

As an aside, I'd be fascinated to conduct a comprehensive survey of lesswrong members to establish the demographics not just with respect to cryonics and LE, but across the board, and in a robust way.

To me, the most relevant reason for not saving for cryonics mentioned here is that the success rate of cryonics is effectively zero at present.

Effectively unknown more than effectively zero. The latter makes it sound like you're expecting revivals to have already happened to demonstrate that it works. Or that you have some other positive information that allows you to conclude that people cryopreserved today will never be revived.

Until then, I'd be more interested in donating to general life extension research than paying for cryonics specifically.

This is very similar to my primary objection to cryonics.

I realize that, all factors considered, the expected utility you'd get from signing up for cryonics is extremely large. Certainly large enough to be worth the price.

However, it seems to me that there are better alternatives. Sure, paying for cryonics increases your chances of nigh-immortality by orders of magnitude. On the other hand, funding longevity research makes it more likely that we will ever overcome aging and disease. Unlimited life for most or all of the future human population is far more important than unlimited life for yourself, right? (One might object that life extension research is already on its way to accomplishing this regardless of your contributions, which brings me to my next point.)

If an existential risk comes to pass, then no one will have a chance at an unlimited life. All of the time and money spent on cryonics will go to waste, and life extension research will have been (mostly) squandered. Preventing this sort of risk is therefore far more important than preserving any one person, even if that person is you. To make matters worse, there are multiple existential risks that have a significant chance of happening, so the need for extra attention and donations is much greater than the need for extra longevity research.

To summarize: Cryonics gives you alone a far bigger chance of nigh-immortality. Working to prevent existential risk gives billions of people a slightly increased chance of the same.

It seems to me we shouldn't be spending money on freezing vitrifying ourselves just in case a singularity (or equivalent scientific progress) happens. Instead, we should focus on increasing the chances that it will happen at all. To do anything else would be selfish.

Ok, time to take a step back and look at some reasons I might be wrong.

First, and perhaps most obviously, people are not inclined to donate all their money to any cause, no matter how important. I freely admit that I will probably donate only a small fraction of my earnings, despite the arguments I made in this post. Plus, it's possible (likely?) that people would be more inclined to spend money on cryonics than on existential risk reduction, because cryonics benefits them directly. If someone is going to spend money selfishly, I suppose cryonics is the most beneficial way to do so.

Second, there's a chance I misestimated the probabilities involved, and in fact your money would be best spent on cryonics. If the Cryonics Institute webpage is to be believed, the cheapest option costs $28,000, which is generally covered by insurance, costing you $120 per year (this option also requires a one-time payment of $1,250). Unfortunately, I have no idea how much $1,250 plus $120 per year would help if donated to SIAI or another such organization. Cryonics certainly give a huge expected reward, and I'm just guessing at the expected reward for donating.

To me, the most relevant reason for not saving for cryonics mentioned here is that the success rate of cryonics is effectively zero at present.

This does not seem to me to be a very solid objection. Cryonics doesn't depend logically on that even being possible.

I am unconvinced that people being dissatisfied with their current lives is a significant reason for rejecting this procedure.

Agreed. It may be a reason, but I don't think it is the main reason.

The success rate of not-cryonics is a guaranteed zero.

I'd go with cryonics.

There are people whose brain activity has ceased, who survived and still consider themselves to be the same person.

If you think living forever is worth money, it's reasonable to sign up for cryonics even if it's unlikely to work, because the other options (being buried in a wooden box or burned to ashes) are considerably less likely to work.