Poll: would you resurrect a stranger from the past if it's expensive?
8
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resolved Jun 7
Resolved
NO
It's expensive. If you don't spend the time and money on resurrecting a stranger, you can instead spend it on having a biological child, or creating a clone of yourself. It's a stranger. Nobody you know, nobody famous, no distant ancestor who holds the secret to unlocking the family pirate treasure. Vote YES or NO. Resolves to % of YES votes. May 29, 2:58pm: I won't vote or bet in this market.
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Planning to resolve at 0%, I don't see any YES votes pre-close.
Here's a market to try to quantify the difference in how people respond to the "personally paying to resurrect one stranger" vs "voting for society to resurrect many strangers": https://manifold.markets/jack/poll-would-you-vote-to-resurrect-pe
I think it's a very different question whether I personally am resurrecting a stranger, or society in general has decided to resurrect a large number of strangers. My bet for cryonics is more motivated by the latter.
It's the same way I personally would not pay a specific stranger's healthcare bills to save their life, but I am willing to pay taxes to provide healthcare to society at large.
Also, in answer to the broader question, if you expect that saving/resurrecting lives will be less expensive in the future relative to our future wealth, that also increases the likelihood of cryopreservation being successful. Another point to consider is that the expenses of resurrection could be funded by the cryonics patients themselves - patients already need to set aside funds with the cryonics provider to pay the necessary upkeep. If you set aside some more, it can be invested and grow quite a lot over time. Such funds could presumably be set aside in trust to be paid out when the technology to revive you becomes available. They could also be paid out to your descendants or to charity in the event that revival becomes impossible. Benjamin Franklin's 200-year charitable trust https://www.historynet.com/ben-franklins-gift-keeps-giving/ is an example of how this can be successful over a long period of time despite multiple practical and legal challenges - his gifts of 2000 pounds (roughly $100k in today's dollars) ultimately grew to a total of about $6.5 million.
bought Ṁ30 of NO
Also note that rate of growth of Ben Franklin's trusts is terribly low compared to many other long-lasting endowments or foundations - the article describes that "the trusts had been badly managed and produced in a century only a fraction of the income his estimates predicted". In comparison https://academic.oup.com/raps/article/10/3/521/5640504 finds that the real returns of a portfolio invested in proportion to the entire global market (which is a balanced mix of riskier assets like stocks and safer assets like bonds) returned 4.45% (that's after subtracting out inflation). So over 200 years, a $1000 investment would grow 6000x to $6m (after adjusting for inflation - the nominal amount in future dollars would be far higher). And https://www.nacubo.org/Research/2021/Historic-Endowment-Study-Data has data on university endowments over the past few decades, their median returns over recent decades looks to be around 5-15% - even higher (this is partly because they can choose a different, possibly riskier investment strategy because instead of being a closed fund they have cash inflows and outflows)
@jack Are people doing this, though? It seems like people are mostly paying for preservation and letting the future worry about the cost of reanimation.
predicted NO
@MartinRandall Yeah, I haven't heard of anyone doing what I suggested, but I think that I will look into setting up something along those lines for myself to increase my cryopreservation success probability (and even if things don't work out with cryopreservation, it can be donated to charity after long term investing, which is not a bad outcome either). I think it's still reasonable to take the gamble on the future handling the cost of reanimation, because futures that have the ability to reanimate us are I think quite correlated with very wealthy futures where the costs are no longer considered expensive.
predicted NO
There are rules (varying depending on state) that limit perpetuities to a defined term (commonly 100 years), so it may not be possible to directly do what I described just for yourself for much longer time periods. But I suspect there are many valid ways to implement this.
@jack In futures where it is easy to clone or create or resurrect a human, there is a population explosion until it is no longer easy. I can imagine futures where resurrection is easy but creating and cloning is hard, but I think it's a small target.
predicted NO
@MartinRandall That's possible but I'm not convinced it's likely. In today's world, there is a strong negative correlation between a country's wealth and fertility rate. We empirically observe that desire to have children decreases with wealth (I don't think this has much to do with cost, but just with preferences.) Cloning or resurrection might change this some but I don't think cloning is that fundamentally different from having children, and the impact of resurrection on population can be seen as not that different from the impact of extending people's lifespans.
@jack The relative cost of having children is higher in wealthier countries, I think. Especially if you include college and government-provided services.
For example I've often read that in low income countries children work for their families and have a negative cost after a few years. I'm not convinced that this is true, but it's still a very different perception from high income countries.
predicted NO
@MartinRandall I've always assumed it was an opportunity cost argument: kids take up a certain amount of years of life to raise, but those years are more expensive as your hourly wage goes up. Implicitly, I guess, this says that the utility of a kid grows less quickly than your utility of money, though. Which I don't know if that seems true. But opportunity cost combined with temporal discounting (the value of a kid is all in the future) might explain most of the difference. On the side of costs: people in rich countries say they want like 2.1 children but end up having like 1.9. (I'm curious what preferred and actual numbers are in poorer countries - guessing 2.5 and 3?)
predicted NO
Oh actually, this article significantly updated my views: turns out even in most developing countries, women want to have more kids than they actually have. Basically, drop in actual fertility is staggering across the board https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-global-fertility-gap
NO, cloning myself seems superior.
@Milli Exactly, why resurrect some weirdo from the past when I can resurrect myself instead?
predicted NO
Same reason saving someone's life is different from having a child? That's how it feels to me.
NO, not if it's as expensive as having a child. Though I would be willing to spend roughly the equivalent of Givewell's cost-to-save-a-life (~$5k) to resurrect a random stranger, because the formulations of both feel roughly equivalent.
Feels about the same to me too, but averting a death feels a bit more morally demanding.
bought Ṁ3 of NO
No
No....?
@MattP it's a weird question. I'm trying to figure out why my intuitions on cryonics are different from many in rationalist and adjacent communities. I don't think people will spend resources resurrecting cryonics "patients" in the same way that we wouldn't spend those resources now on people in the past, even if we could.
predicted NO
@MartinRandall mmm, I see. Wouldn't there be the additional factor of the contractual ethical obligation for a cryonics patient?
@MattP When I last looked at this, it seemed that normal cryonics price tags did not cover reanimation. Someone could set up a fund but my understanding is that such funds have to have a public purpose, like Franklin's discussed above, not a private purpose like resurrecting Martin Randall in particular. As it happens, many rich people in Europe in the middle ages paid for churches to pray for them after death to give them a better afterlife. I think those contracts have now all been broken, and probably they weren't very effective. . I don't feel a strong ethical urge to prioritize those bodies for resurrection.