0.10 Something happens to you financially where you can no longer afford this
This one seems conceptually strange in a cost-benefit analysis: if you get into straits in which you don't want to pay your insurance premia and membership fees, then you stop paying and lose the protection (unless you have been suspended or died in the interim). In this situation both the costs and benefits are reduced, so it shouldn't play the role it does in the above calculation.
0.03 You mess up the paperwork, either for cryonics or life insurance
This rate is empirically too high.
0.20 Not all of what makes you you is encoded in the physical state of the brain
Why so high?
0.35 Other (there are always other things that can go wrong)
One does have to inform this probability by historical rates.
Something goes wrong in reviving
A lot of these claims are going to be correlated with each other and brain preservation adequacy (from the first section), likewise for technological/economic capacities and interests. If you apply a mistaken independence assumption and break apart many correlated things you'll get big underestimates of probability.
This is not the first time I've seen an attempt at calculating it; I will note that it's interesting that the more steps you add, the lower your probability gets. It's a strange kind of analysis that can only go downwards...
That is true, but this style of analysis is predicated on a sequence of steps, each one of which must succeed, and hence the more steps you have, the lower the end result probability must be; if you were just correcting for overestimation by analysis, then there ought to be analyses or points where one realizes one has been too pessimistic and increases the probability.
But that can never happen with this kind of analysis: the small result is built into the conjunctions. If one realizes one was wrong in giving the probability of a particular factor, well, one can just 'fix' that by breaking it into some more substeps with <1 probability!
And if you look, there are illegitimate conjunctions in the OP. For example, 'cryonics company is out of capacity', besides being way too high (notice that '86% chance 'something goes wrong in getting you frozen' fails a basic outside view test - suspensions do go wrong fairly frequently, but not anywhere close to 86% of the time!), is a false conjunction; if you're paid up for Alcor, why can't CI handle your case or vice versa? Cryonics companies have taken patients off each others' hands before.
.03 seems really high for messing up the paperwork. Sure you might mess up the initial paperwork but then it will be noticed and fixed.
.06 seems too low for chance of dying in a circumstance where they can't preserve you. Especially if one isn't very old, the chance of death from sudden trauma is much higher than other forms of death.
The Alzheimer's thing is overestimated. One can in many places (and the number of places is growing) engage in euthanasia. Even in the US people can directly take steps to drastically decrease their lifespans such as by self-starvation. Also, unless you die in very late stage Alzheimer's most of the information is likely to be intact. Alzheimer's also has a very large genetic component, so if no one in one's family got it one is probably safe.
I don't know why you think the cryonic's company running out of capacity should be that likely- with so few people signed up that simply isn't a serious risk.
The insurance company issues aren't a problem. There are companies now which have policies geared to cryonics. And if a company goes insolvent, unless this happens just when you are dying, switching to another insurance company should not be hard.
You seem t...
You seem to be assigning a high probability to exotic problems (information isn't preserved by freezing, global apocalypse) and a low probability to mundane problems (you die of Alzheimer's, cryonics companies go out of business). The reverse seems more likely to me.
You die of something like Altzheimers where the brain is degraded at death
Not all of what makes you you is encoded in the physical state of the brain
The current cryonics process is insufficient to preserve everything
You've then got to weight these things against how much you would count a less-than-perfect revival as a partial success. The me that's alive today, after all, is not the same person, in opinions, memories, even abilities, as the me of twenty years ago, but I still count both as "me".
I took your estimates, and sorted them into categories. These are the categories I came up with and their total probability of failure, by your estimate:
0.90 Insurmountable technical obstacle (cryonics process at the time you die (not necessarily today) doesn't preserve everything, or technological development stops prior to development of molecular nanotech, or molecular nanotech doesn't do what we think it does and no substitutes exist)
0.74 Other (wtf?)
0.625 Society chooses to let you die or not resurrect you (companies go bankrupt and no one takes over the maintenance; or no one does the resurrection, conditional on no legal problems)
0.56 Societal collapse or human extinction
0.27 Cryonics or resurrection is banned (but I think this is strongly correlated with societal collapse - they're both caused by insanity)
0.27 You aren't actually frozen or your brain is badly damaged first
0.24 Cryonics companies screw up (improper freezing or later thawing)
0.2 You are not your brain
Overall probability of failure: 0.998
This is wildly, wildly pessimistic. Here are my estimates for the same categories:
...0.3 Insurmountable technical obstacle
0.0 Other (this list is exhaustive)
0.05 Cryonics o
That strikes me as an astonishingly high estimate for "You are not your brain." Care to elaborate?
I was going to say something about matrix universes and the possibility that I'm systematically deceived, but then I realized that the real answer for why I gave such a high estimate (0.05) is that I started with Jeff's estimate of 0.2 as an anchor.
(I think jfaufman was originally thinking of the possibility that the spine and peripheral nervous system are important, but you can get those frozen too.)
I'd like to see more emphasis on the question: What do we have to do to make cryonics work?
The critics who dismiss cryonics for reasons like the failure points mentioned above have a defensible point of view, given how they've framed the problem.
Someone who thinks like an inventor knowledgeable about biology, by contrast, could say, "No, no, no! Cryonics won't work if you do it THAT way!" He might then try to imagine end results of successful revival from cryostasis, then work backwards based on current scientific knowledge and a parsimonious use...
How exactly have you arrived at these probabilities ? For example, why is the probability of "all people die" 0.3, as opposed to 0.01 or 0.9 ? These numbers seem to be completely arbitrary to me, but maybe I'm missing something.
Any summary report of probabilities is going to sound arbitrary in some sense. I'd prefer a norm that doesn't demand an impossible standard of detail to state current views for every point, which discourages people from making themselves clear in this way. Instead, people who disagree for communicable reasons can challenge particular premises and the poster can engage on them. This role, of making beliefs explicit so as to focus discussion on productive areas, seems worth protecting.
The probability that cryonics will work likely exceeds 85%, discounting dystopian futures, assuming a good quality of cryopreservation, and assuming that MNT is developed more or less as expected.
The usual error made in these analyses is to imagine many different kinds of "disasters", all correlated, that could cause cryonics to fail, and then multiply their probabilities together. But because all the probabilities are correlated, the resulting overall probability is unrealistically low, often by orders of magnitude.
The only real problems are (a)...
I have a vague impression that "the laws of physics are reversible" is not actually true.
Well, it's not like the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a law of physics. It'd be in the title or something.
Can I suggest putting this calculation in a google doc so it's easy for people to copy and work out their own estimates?
I upvoted because this is a good effort to make your probabilities explicit.
One meta point: A lot of this seems a bit too nihilistic. Cryonics is small, very small. If you, Jeff Kaufman, decide (and actually go through with the process) of signing up, that act non-trivially decreases the probability that cryonics will be outlawed. If you decide to contribute even in some small way to the (non-profit) org, that act decreases the probability that the org will fail, scaled (enormously) by how actively you engage. If you move closer to the org you sign up wit...
There has been some discussion on this thread about who would revive you once you were cryopreserved, and how they would pay for it.
This is covered in the Alcor FAQ (which is really excellent, and well worth browsing):
Q: Who will revive the patients?
A: The short answer is "Alcor will revive them."
The third item in Alcor's mission statement is: "Eventually restore to health all patients in Alcor's care."
Reviving the patients is also required by Alcor's contracts with members: "When, in Alcor's best good faith judgement, it is determ...
If an American signs up for cryonics and pays their ~$300/year, what are their odds of being revived?
Don't know, "sufficiently small" about covers it. If you have a better ~$300/year bet to gain the whole future, this question would be worth answering.
Less
"the payoff is really high
and more "the payoff is in a different class to anything else that's within a modest salary's reach".
Like, if there were no computers, and everyone did math in their head, and we were still stuck bartering between villages - cryonics is not a sho...
The fact that some of Harvard's brain collection just thawed makes me think it's likely to eventually happen to other institutions, too.
0.30 No one is interested in my brain's information
0.40 It is too expensive to extract my brain's information
I always assumed that the cryonics companies would pay for that with the extra interest. I suppose the second one could still be true if it takes a noticeable portion of the economy.
I would put those at significantly more likely than even the pessimistic author had. After all, where on earth would the money come from to bring you back?
Imagine that your favorite cryonics company (Alcor/TransTime/CryonicsInstitute/etc) existed back in 1911 and has finally discovered how to thaw people, 100 years later. They magically came across the process back then and there's warehouses full of people who can come back if the company spends a modest sum of $50,000 on the revival (which is a way, way, way, way low estimate). Their contracts back in 1911 were exactly the same as current ones.
The first couple would get thawed out as proof the tech works; the next few would be celebrities or people who have still-surviving rich family; after that nobody else would get thawed. Why would they? Nobody's going to care about the rights of someone 100 years dead. There wouldn't be a huge interest group interested in bringing back hundred year old corpses. Modern society wouldn't want these people, who are racist, sexist, superstitious, have zero job skills, have zero life skills, and would cost enormous amounts to social services before they're productive members of society (if ...
Too high:
You mess up the paperwork, either for cryonics or life insurance
Some law is passed that prohibits cryonics (before you're even dead)
Not all of what makes you you is encoded in the physical state of the brain
All people die (nuclear war? comet strike? nanotech?)
The technology is never developed to extract the information
It is too expensive to extract my brain's information
Running people in simulation is outlawed
It is too expensive to run me in simulation (if we get this far I expect cheap powerful computers)
Far too low:
...You die suddenly or in a
The choice to suspend yourself is strictly personal and highly speculative at best despite what you might hear from the various organizations out there or other "true believers". The honest organizations will tell you there are no guarantees and the process is entirely speculative, however if you don't have yourself frozen upon "deanimation" (their word for death) there's a 100% certainty you will not be "reanimated". I first learned about cryonics preservation in 1968 when the movement's founder Robert C.W. Ettinger appeared with Johnny Carson on the Ton...
I really like that you did this, jkaufman - it's good to see a couple breakdowns like this. However, I think this would be best setup as the chance of post-cryonics disasters happening on a yearly basis, so you could modify the final outcome based on a prediction of how long it will take for reviving crynoics patients to be viable. This is harder to do, obviously, but I think it would give a better outcome. The chance of some X-risk before revival are greater if you expect to be preserved for 500 years than if you think we'll be able to revive cryonics patients in 100 years.
If an American signs up for cryonics and pays their ~$300/year, what are their odds of being revived?
This may just be my own intuition running away on me, but it seems like there are two different answers to that question.
In an absolute sense (as in, percentage of everett branches where you are revived from cryonics), the chances are probably pretty slim.
However, in a subjective sense. ("You" experience waking up from cryonics), the chances seem near certain. It's not like you'd be aware of any of the universes where you weren't revived, after all.
I think only a tiny minority of lesswrong readers, believe in cryopreservation. If people genuinely believed in it then they would not wait until they were dying to preserve themselves, since the cumulative risk of death or serious mental debilitation before cryopreservation would be significant, the consequence is loss of (almost) eternal life, while by early cryopreservation all they have to lose is their current, finite life, in the "unlikely" event that they are not successfully reanimated. If people were actually trying to preserve themselve...
If an American signs up for cryonics and pays their ~$300/year, what are their odds of being revived? Talking to people at LessWrong meetups I've heard estimates of 1 in 2. My friend George Dahl, whose opinion I respect a lot, guesses "less than 1 in 10^6". Niether has given me reasons, those numbers are opaque. My estimate of these odds pretty much determines whether I should sign up. I could afford $300/year, and I would if I thought the odds were 1:2, but not if they were 1:10^6. [1]
In order to see how likely this is to work, we should look at the process. I would sign up with a cryonics company and for life insurance. I'd go on living, enjoying my life and the people around me, paying my annual fees, until some point when I died. After death they would drain my blood, replace it with something that doesn't rupture cell walls when it freezes, freeze me in liquid nitrogen, and leave me there for a long time. At some point, probably after the development of nanotechnology, people would revive me, probably as a computer program.
There's a lot of steps there, and it's easy to see ways they could go wrong. [3] Let's consider some cases and try to get probabilities [4]:
Update: the probabilities below are out of date, and only useful for understanding the comments. I've made a spreadsheet listing both my updated probabilities and those for as many other people as I can find: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...
| 0.03 | You mess up the paperwork, either for cryonics or life insurance |
| 0.10 | Something happens to you financially where you can no longer afford this |
| 0.06 | You die suddenly or in a circumstance where you would not be able to be frozen in time (see leading causes of death) |
| 0.04 | You die of something like Altzheimers where the brain is degraded at death (Altzheimers is much more common than brain cancer) |
| 0.01 | The cryonics company is temporarily out of capacity and cannot actually take you, perhaps because lots of people died at once |
| 0.02 | The life insurance company does not pay out, perhaps it's insolvent, perhaps it argues you're not dead yet |
| 0.02 | You die in a hospital that refuses access to you by the cryonics people |
| 0.02 | After death your relatives reject your wishes and don't let the cryonics people freeze you |
| 0.10 | Some law is passed that prohibits cryonics (before you're even dead) |
| 0.20 | The cryonics people make a mistake in freezing you (how do we know they don't make lots of mistakes?) |
| 0.20 | Not all of what makes you you is encoded in the physical state of the brain |
| 0.50 | The current cryonics process is insufficient to preserve everything |
| 0.35 | Other (there are always other things that can go wrong) |
| 0.86 | Something goes wrong in getting you frozen |
|---|
| 0.30 | All people die (nuclear war? comet strike? nanotech?) |
| 0.20 | Society falls apart (remember this is the chance that society will fall apart given that we did not see "all people die") |
| 0.10 | Some time after you die cryonics is outlawed |
| 0.15 | All cryonics companies go out of business |
| 0.30 | The cryonics company you chose goes out of business |
| 0.05 | Your cryonics company screws something up and you are defrosted (power loss, perhaps. Are we really expecting perfect operation for decades?) |
| 0.30 | Other |
| 0.80 | Something goes wrong in keeping you frozen |
|---|
| 0.10 | It is impossible to extract all the information preseved in the frozen brain |
| 0.50 | The technology is never developed to extract the information |
| 0.30 | No one is interested in my brain's information |
| 0.40 | It is too expensive to extract my brain's information |
| 0.03 | Reviving people in simulation is impossible |
| 0.20 | The technology is never developed to run people in simulation |
| 0.10 | Running people in simulation is outlawed |
| 0.10 | No one is interested running me in simulation (even though they were interested enough to extract the neccesary information from my frozen brain) |
| 0.05 | It is too expensive to run me in simulation (if we get this far I expect cheap powerful computers) |
| 0.40 | Other |
| 0.93 | Something goes wrong in reviving |
|---|
| 0.05 | Other |
| 0.05 | Something else goes wrong |
|---|
Combined Probability Of Failure: 99.82%
Odds of success: 1 in 567.
If you can think of other ways cryonics might fail, moving probability mass from "other" to something more quantifiable, that would be helpful. If you think my numbers are off for something, please let me know what a better number would be and why. This is not final.
Am I going about this right? Do people here who think it's rational to sign up for cryonics take a "the payoff is really high, so the small probability doesn't matter" view? Am I overly pessimistic about its chances of success?
Note: I originally posted this on my blog, and the version there has a silly javascript calculator for playing with the probabilities.
[1] To figure out what odds I would accept, I think the right approach is to treat this as if I were considering signing up for something certain and see how much I would pay, then see what odds bring this below $300/year. Even at 1:2 odds this is less effective than Village Reach at averting death [2], so this needs to come out of my 'money spent on me' budget. I think $10,000/year is about the most I'd be willing to spend. It's a lot, but not dying would be pretty nice. This means I'd need odds of 1:33 to sign up.
[2] Counter argument: you should care about quality adjusted life years and not deaths averted. Someone revived maybe should expect to have millenia of life at very high quality. This seems less likely to me than just the claim "will be revived". A lot less likely.
[3] In order to deal with independence issues, all my probability guesses are conditional on everything above them not happening. Each of these things must go right, so this works. For example, society collapsing and my cryonics organization going out of business are very much not independent. So the probability assigned to the latter is the chance that society won't collapse, but my organization goes out of business anyway. This means I can just multiply up the subelements to get probabilities for sections, and then multiply up sections to get an overall probability.
[4] This has a lot in common with the Warren formula, which was inspired by the Drake equation. Robin Hanson also has a breakdown. I also found a breakdown on LessWrong that seems really optimistic.
EDIT 2011-09-26: jsalvatier suggested an online spreadsheet, which is very sensible. Created
EDIT 2011-09-27: I've updated my probabilities some, and made the updates on the spreadsheet.