For:
I like the idea of living
Potentially increased transhumanist cred
Against:
Price
Effort to sign up
Reward seems low with impending AGI
Potentially increased possibility of suffering
Close date updated to 2023-12-31 5:31 pm
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Cryonics is basically an insurance policy with substantial upside. You said that cost seems high but you are attracted to the benefit. If you are interested, at least take a pass at figuring out how to pay for it. Then you will do a better job of deciding if you want to do it now. I would not recommend making lifestyle sacrifices to pay for cryonics when you die, but if the cost is only eating into your savings, I think it is an excellent tradeoff.
I would point out that signing up for cryonics is prosocial: if you believe it can work, then being early in the adoption curve is a way to have a potentially big impact on the likelihood that it works out for everyone, both by normalizing it today and, when you die, adding another patient that the world is morally obliged to save someday.
I don't think "AGI is coming" argument is too applicable for cryonics since cryonics is so speculative anyway. Even if you think 80% AGI doom, that should reduce your chance of benefiting from cryonics by only a factor of 5, which (in my estimates) still leaves it justified. Also, the higher your doom estimate, the less your savings is worth; this somewhat counteracts the reduced-chance-of-cryonics-success (but not fully, since the savings will be more useful if you can find ways to spend to have a better life pre-AGI)
Signing up for cryonics pre-emptively is valuable in a pretty narrow range of situations. Most things will either kill you quickly in ways where you can't really be preserved, or will kill you slowly enough that you'll have time to make arrangements. (Also, the situations where you can plausibly be cryopreserved but don't have time to make arrangements are also the situations where cryopreservation is least likely to work.)
I think the main value of signing up is if you can afford the insurance but aren't sure you could cover the cost of cryopreservation out of pocket. I pretty strongly suspect that in the unlikely case you need cryopreservation in the next N years but don't have the cash on hand for it, you could convince some combination of people in your extended community to contribute enough to fund it.
@MichaelLucy cryonics costs >$100k which most people, especially young people, can't exactly summon on demand, while life insurance costs maybe $1-2k / yr, which is far from free but generally pretty doable. Further, if you actually care about being cryopreserved well, it's important to start procedures within minutes, which won't exactly happen if people are standing around trying to call people to commit money to your GoFundMe.
I do think it's potentially reasonable to, say, be 25 and think it's better to sign up for cryonics when one is 35 instead of right away, but I think the finances often don't work out in your favor that much.
@SeraphinaNix I definitely think it depends a lot on personal situation. There was some additional information shared in the comments of https://manifold.markets/Alana/how-much-money-will-i-make-in-2023 that seems relevant to the financial question.
Separate from the financial question, everyone I can think of who's died in their 20s either died very suddenly (such that even with an Alcor membership their brain would've been warm for a long time), or else had at least a week or two of lead time to sort things out. But it's possible I'm underestimating how many people have more like a day, in which case I agree there's a lot of value in not trying and possible failing to handle everything at the very last minute.