me: So, you know what cryonics is?
her: Yes
me: And you think it's a good idea?
her: Yes
me: And you are not signed up yet?
her: Yes
me: And you would like to be?
her: Yes
You might have wanted to use a control question (e.g. "How many days are in a week?"), just to check if she'd have answered "yes" to that, too.
I assume the whole point was to create a compliance ladder (aka yes ladder). It's the same technique used to sell cars, close business deals, or seduce others. It's at least as old as Dale Carnegie's "How to Win friends...etc", and probably older than English.
A single 'no' breaks the pattern just as drastically as a single non-conformist destroys the Asch conformity experiment. If he wanted to find out true answers, a control question would be useful. But if he wanted her to actually sign up for cryonics, an unbroken chain of 'yes' would be essential.
Well, submitting a quote request form as a "Yes Y. Yes born on Yes.Yes.Yes" would not lead to anything anyway, so why bother with extra steps?
Another nudge: Once you sign up for Cyrogenics, Robin Hanson will chat with you about anything you want.
I'm not currently aware of anyone living in Finland who has successfully signed for cryonics. I'm aware of someone who tried to sign up with Alcor, but was deterred by the international complexities involved with setting up the financing. There's a very fledgling Finnish cryonics society, and I think some of them have talked about arrangements with KrioRus, but I don't think I've ever heard of even the founders talk about actually having a specific cryonics arrangement for themselves.
Ciphergoth is in UK, and I think he has managed to sign up. Anyone from the non-anglosphere Europe successfully signed up? Anyone know of anyone from the non-anglosphere Europe ever actually being successfully cryopreserved?
European balkanization messes up all sorts of long tails.
If anyone else dislikes Rudi the way I do (and doesn't need his help to get signed up at all), my life insurance company is pretty okay; they're called New York Life. I picked them off a list of cryo-friendly insurance companies Alcor provided in an info packet (even though I went with CI) and they have been very responsive and are willing to conduct all relevant business without the use of telephones (which criterion is part of how I narrowed down said list).
The websites for both are poorly designed and the only thing I could figure out was that maybe under some circumstances CI was cheaper. Not being able to distinguish between relevant features, and feeling it fairly urgent that I stop dithering and start signing up, I blatantly substituted Eliezer's judgment for my own and went with the one he picked.
Not deaf, just hate phones and am very much aware of my tendency to just not make calls even when I really should.
Hi, thanks for the link, I just went and filled out Rudi's form, just in case. However, I'm not expecting it to do any good as I'm a UK citizen.
A while ago, ciphergoth gave me an e-mail address for a UK cryonics organisation, and I tried it, but I got no response from them, and I think a couple of other Cambridge types have tried to make contact and got no response, which makes me think that they may not be that reliable at showing up quickly at death scenes either.
CI seem cheap at $28000, so even though I'm not at all sure that a copy of me waking up know...
I'm wondering if there is any selfish reason to want procryostinators to sign up, other than hoping that more participants would improve the odds of your favorite cryo outfit surviving until the time revival becomes feasible, or that more research would go into it?
More people signing up reduces the social stigma attached to being signed up.
Convincing people to sign up lets you write articles about how you did it, which generate karma.
Having more people signed up increases knowledge about cryonics generally, and increases the odds that your wishes will be followed on your death.
People who you convinced to sign up sooner who then die promptly may feel obligated to you after they're revived.
Aside from the problem with the yes chains, I suspect that a lot of people, when answering "yes" to "do you think that (unusual subject) is a good idea", mean "to the extent that I've studied it, it seems to be a good idea, but I haven't studied it a whole lot". They may not, in fact, be certain enough of it to go out and do it, even though they would verbally describe it as a good idea.
I was planning to write this up when I had the full results, but seeing this story of a young woman with brain cancer forced to beg to raise funds at the last minute reminded me that cryocrastinators are running out of time (even though getting brain cancer young is rare, there are cryocrastinators of all ages who aren't aware of when life insurance will become unaffordable).
Hm. Based on the research I did, there's no special advantage life-insurance-wise to signing up early. This makes sense from an economics point of view--there's no reason in particular for life insurance providers to give you an especially good deal just because you signed up early.
I'll bet at least a few people save their money or donate to charity instead of buying stuff they don't really need.
That sounds like a bet you would win. However, the thing I claim no one is actually doing is taking the money they would be spending on whole life insurance premiums, and investing it as well as an insurance provider would, for the purpose of later subsidizing the larger premiums they would have to pay for whole life insurance when they are older. That would be a crazy thing to do, as it is more work, more risk in resources that are sub-linearly instrumentally valued, and doesn't cover you during the time you are investing instead of paying premiums.
I was explicitly talking about whole life insurance, which I advocate using for cryonics, and which I use myself. It is more expensive initially, but it lets you lock in your premiums when you are young and healthy.
If you do use term life insurance, it is cheaper when you are young because you are less likely to die during the term. But, unless you have a plan for how to fund your cryonic suspension after you survive the term, using it to fund cryonics is crazy.
I do not endorse citing the premiums for term life insurance as the cost of cryonics.
On the form, there is a question about Nicotine Usage. Is nicotine usage being conflated with smoking here?
At the end of CFAR's July Rationality Minicamp, we had a party with people from the LW/SIAI/CFAR community in the San Francisco Bay area. During this party, I had a conversation with the girlfriend of a participant in a previous minicamp, who was not signed up for cryonics (her boyfriend was). The conversation went like this:
me: So, you know what cryonics is?
her: Yes
me: And you think it's a good idea?
her: Yes
me: And you are not signed up yet?
her: Yes
me: And you would like to be?
her: Yes
me: Wait a minute while I get my laptop.
And I got my laptop, pointed my browser at Rudi Hoffman's quote request form1, and said, "Here, fill out this form". And she did.
The hard part of all that was identifying a cryocrastinator, by which I mean someone who believes they should be signed up for cryonics, but for whatever reason, hasn't actually signed up. Once I know that I am talking to such a person, just giving them an actionable first step to do right now gets them to do that step.
Previously to the party, I had held an "unconference" seminar for cryocrastinating minicampers in which I did a scaled up version of the same thing. For this I told everyone in advance to bring their own laptops, and I gave them the URL. (There was some confusion about the target audience of this seminar, and some people who were not yet convinced it was a good idea for them came expecting more of a discussion. They had no trouble expressing this, and were not required to fill out the form.) At the party, I did this for one other person2.
What I have observed to work so far is that people will take the first step of filling out the quote request form when I make it easy for them. I am counting on Rudi to get them through the rest of the process, so they end up actually signed up. Rudi has agreed to track success rates of these people getting through the whole process, and I plan to check in with him in early December, and report back.
I was planning to write this up when I had the full results, but seeing this story of a young woman with brain cancer forced to beg to raise funds at the last minute reminded me that cryocrastinators are running out of time (even though getting brain cancer young is rare, there are cryocrastinators of all ages who aren't aware of when life insurance will become unaffordable). So I thought it would be good to let people know now how easy it is to get that cryocrastinator you know to get started signing up.
Again, all you have to do is establish that they want to be signed up for cryonics but aren't, and put this form in front of them and tell them that filling it out is the first step. Rudi will take them through the rest of it. And if you yourself are cryocrastinating, take a few minutes for your first step in signing up by filling out the form.
(If you do not already think cryonics is a good idea, I do not expect you to follow any of the advice in this article. I wrote this for the benefit of all the people who do think cryonics is a good idea, but are having trouble actually signing up. You may be interested in trying to generalize the technique for other forms of procrastination, however.)
1. Yes, Rudi Hoffman will make some money off of this. He should, as he is putting in professional hours to provide a valuable service. But the motivation behind this article is to get people to sign up for cryonics. Other paths with other first steps are welcome, as is any advice for people outside the United States.
2. I am not naming the other people involved. They can opt in to identifying themselves if they want.