

Cryonics reduces suffering - lsparrish
https://plus.google.com/u/0/104271274646422270766/posts/6tqKZKz5bDr

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pjscott
Of course, the premise of cryonics is that at some point in the indefinite
future, civilization will take _far more heroic_ efforts to restore injured
and frozen people to health. What it achieves is pushing those costs into the
future. Either medicine will advance far enough that healing the frozen people
becomes a reasonable act of social generosity, or they never get unfrozen, in
which case cryonics is equivalent to plain old death, plus some relatively
small costs for preserving the body.

So, it sounds like cryonics is worth it if you think the probability of being
revived and cured in the future is high enough to outweigh the marginal
increase in costs over having your body buried or cremated.

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lsparrish
That's not a premise of it at all, if you ask me. For all we know reanimation
may in fact be _much_ less costly to the given future society than current
medical efforts are to current society. Anyway the default expectation should
be that it is a hard to develop _process_ , but easy to apply to many patients
once developed. It could be as simple as pushing a button or throwing a
switch, once developed.

Fewer patients in existence would make it less likely to be worth the initial
investment in the process if the cost is large -- a classic scaling problem.
Imagine if operating systems or web browsers were only used by a few people in
the world; it would not be worth investing nearly as much effort into them as
we do. It is also much cheaper to store many versus a few patients for long
periods of time, at least if we are counting costs on a per patient basis,
because of the square-cube law and its effects on heat transfer to and from
large versus small bodies (dewars).

Furthermore, when patients go into cryostasis they always place money into an
investment fund where it generates interest. The decision to invest that money
instead of spending it wastefully during their lifetime or on prolonging their
dying moments is one that benefits the people of the future steadily over a
long period of time. All this talk about pushing the load onto the future or
depending on future generosity is therefore silly. Yes, people in the future
do have to cooperate in a prisoner's dilemma by not killing the patients and
stealing their investments, but that's simple non-defection of the sort we
routinely expect from peers (you probably won't kill me and steal my stuff).
We aren't expecting any extreme sacrifices on their part, as long as the trust
funds are not overwhelmingly evil about their investment strategies.

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pjscott
I think I worded that unclearly, and we pretty much agree. What I meant was
that hopefully the costs of healing a bunch of people will be so much lower in
the future that people won't see any reason not to thaw out some frozen folks
who would once have been considered terminally ill, _even if there were no
financial incentive to do so_. Obviously I hope that everybody who gets frozen
also has sizable long-term investments which work out well and make them loads
of money, and I find that the most likely scenario, but I'd rather not depend
entirely on it. Crazy black swan events have been known to wreck even really
good plans. (This is also the thing that appeals to me about the plans for
building enormous tanks that can keep their occupants cold for prolonged
periods without maintenance, in case something goes badly wrong for a while.)

You make some really interesting points about scaling. Cryonics could
aggregate together demand for cures to rare problems, which would change the
economic incentives for medical R&D. I hadn't thought of that, but you're
right.

