This was my entry to the lesswrong essay contest on whether a utilitarian should sign up for cryonics:
A perfect utilitarian living a well-off life would devote themselves to altruism, finding
the most effective charitable options and putting their full work towards them. In a
utilitarianism for human beings, however, we have to reserve some of our time and money
for ourselves, for things we will enjoy, that will revitalize us, and that will keep us
going. Instead of considering every single choice in terms of whether it would make you
happy enough to justify the expenditure when the opportunity
cost is so high, it works well to set a
budget. You should give yourself
some amount of money to spend on yourself, in whatever way you like best.
Out of your self-spending budget you might buy housing, food, clothes, ice cream, or games.
For each of these, you consider how much money you have available, weigh whether the
purchase would be worth it, and decide to buy or not. This is the standard approach that
is used all over, by utilitarians and not, and it generally works well.
Considering cryonics, which category should we put it in? Is signing up for cryonics spending money as effectively
as possible to make the world better, or is it spending to make yourself happier? Could
buying cryonics for yourself have enough altruistic benefit to be up there with the most
cost-effective charities, or at least be in that range? To get some very
rough numbers, GiveWell estimates that the
AMF averts a death for each
$2500 donated, or under $100 per additional year of life. This may not be the best
altruistic option, but it sets a baseline cryonics would need to beat. Neuropreservation
costs around $80k, so for it to be more cost effective than giving to the AMF you would
need to think it’s at least 10% likely give you 8,000 years of additional life. Those
numbers are both very high, and keep in mind that we’re comparing something very
speculative to something much more heavily studied and we should expect less-studied
interventions to look worse the more into the details we get.
Cryonics should, however, benefit from being more widely adopted. Both the freezing
process and the long-term storage have many inefficiencies that come from being run at
very small-scales. Cryonics organizations would be less likely to collapse over time if
they were more central to our culture. If more people cared about freezing brains it
would be higher status to research it and the technology would likely improve. This would
bring down the costs and raise the probability of success. The question is, how much does your signing up do to improve these?
Perhaps if cryonics got up to 10% of the US population then the chances of success would be significantly higher. Linearity seems roughly right here, and the population is 300M, so your signup would bring us one 30 millionth of the way to 10%. This doesn’t seem big enough to be a major factor. Similarly, while it’s possible existential risks would be taken much more seriously if a substantial fraction of the population expected to live extremely long lives barring catastrophe, your signing up doesn’t bring us very far in that direction. Funding for the Future of Humanity institute probably goes much farther.
Even if you do think the benefit of a marginal person signing up is large enough to compete with top charities, it’s not clear that marginal person should be you. You should consider whether you could get these same benefits more efficiently through an organization that advocated people sign up for cryonics. With $80k to spend you should be able to get multiple signups, perhaps through running essay contests.
It’s also useful to step back, however, and consider how valuable it is to preserve and
revive people. If you’re a total hedonistic utilitarian, caring about there being as many good lives
over all time as possible, deaths averted isn’t the real metric. Instead the question is
how many lives will there be and how good are they? In a future society with the
technology to revive cryonics patients there would still be some kind of resource limits
bounding the number of people living or being emulated. Their higher technology would
probably allow them to have as many people alive as they chose, within those bounds. If
they decided to revive people, this would probably come in place of using those resources
to create additional people or run more copies of existing people. This suggests cryonics
doesn’t actually make there be more people, just changes which people there are. If you’re funding cryonics for the most intelligent, conscientious, or creative people then this might be somewhat useful, but the chances that any of us are the best candidate here are low.
(This applies less if you’re more of a preference utilitarian, trying to have as many satisfied preferences as possible. Death is generally a major preference violation, and fewer longer lives via cryonics would mean many fewer deaths.)
Even if signing up for cryonics isn’t the best thing you can do altruistically, though, that doesn’t mean you can’t do it. It just should be considered in the self-spending category, compared against
things like a nicer house, tastier food, or more travel. In deciding whether to purchase
cryonics for yourself the main consideration is how likely it is to work. If you think it
has a 20% chance, all things considered, you could probably find $1000/​year in your budget
for it. At a 0.01% chance, however, it’s pretty likely that there’s something else which
would give you more enjoyment for the money. The cost is high enough that if you’re
considering cryonics it’s definitely worth it for you to put time into getting a good
handle on how likely it is. Breaking cryonics
down might be helpful
here, to help overcome the planning fallacy.
This was my entry to the lesswrong essay contest on whether a utilitarian should sign up for cryonics: