Cryonics Chances

Attending an event on cryonics this last weekend tempts me to revisit the topic. And given the crazy tiny number of folks who have signed up for it (~4K), compared to the vast numbers of people (e.g., ~30% of my followers, & ~10% of my undergrads) who say that they think the product makes sense for them, the big cryonics marketing puzzle is: why aren’t far more people customers?  The unexplained ratio (~5% of 8B / 4K) is roughly a factor of ~10,000!

To explore a rational choice framework for this question, I did “break it down” polls: 

“Cryonics” is where people are “frozen” when current medicine gives up on them, & stored until a future medicine might fix/revive them. Success requires many steps to all go right. In next 8 polls, I’ll ask you for average chance each step goes right, given all prior steps go right.

Those steps: 

1. Die So Can Freeze - If you were to be a cryonics customer, you'd “die” in a way/place that would let a competent cryonics org freeze you reasonably soon/fast, if they existed & showed up

2. Get Frozen Well - your cryonics org actually still exists, shows up, competently freezes you, & also your family, friends, docs, govt all allow this

3. Save Enough Info - freezing stores enough info to let an arbitrarily advanced civ “revive” a thinks-&-acts-much-like-you creature from your frozen remains

4. Advanced Civ Arises - eventually civilizations advanced enough to revive you eventually arise on/near Earth

5. It Chooses To Revive - these civs learn about you, & would choose to actually revive you, if you were available for this

6. Org Saves You Long - your cryonics org, plus other successor orgs, manage to stick around & keep you frozen until this advanced civ arises, & then they allow your revival

7. Decent Quality of Life - once revived, this new "you" has a quality of life not terribly worse than yours now

8. You Now Value It - you now value the life of this future "you" enough to pay a substantial price now to promote its life then

I also asked about:

• Total - your total chance of success, the product of all these conditional probabilities from the last 8 polls

For each of these steps, here are the medians and sigmas for lognormal fits to responses for each step. (Sigmas are in e units. # is number of poll responses.)

Note that as the product is a factor of ~60x smaller than than the estimated total, we are only getting very rough estimates of respondent opinions on chances here. Note also that these lognormal fits don’t constrain chances to be less than one, which is why the median for step 7 is above one. Note further that the sigma of the total, though big, is much less than the sum of step sigmas, suggesting big correlations across step estimates. Finally, note that the key marketing puzzle remains, ~14% say total chance is >5%, yet only two parts in a million of the world are actual customers.

Even so, these polls may help us see where people’s doubts are concentrated. We should ask not just where are doubts the biggest, but more importantly, where might we cut doubts the easiest? 

For example, the last two steps (7,8), though often mentioned as issues, are the least worrisome to respondents. So we should mostly ignore them. In contrast, the first two steps (1,2) have median estimated failure rates of ~69%, far higher than we see in actual cryonics data. So educating folks on these stats seems the easiest way to cut customer doubts. (Cryonics orgs: care to post authoritative stats on these params?) 

Two middle steps (4,5) also seem promising; respondents estimate a median ~81% failure chance that advanced future civs able to revive them would choose not to do so, and a ~72% failure chance that no civ will ever arise near Earth with very advanced tech abilities. These seem quite wrong to me, and it shouldn’t be that hard to explain why to potential customers. If we could raise customer success estimates by a factor of two on each of four steps (1,2,4,5), that should raise the median estimated total chance of success by a factor of 16. The product would rise to 0.02%, while the total would rise to 1.75%, a level that plausibly justifies cryonics as cost-effective.

Though cryonics is a tiny industry, it has disproportionately large (though still absolutely small) associated R&D activity, mostly supported by donations, not customers. And this research is mostly targeted at step 3, the one with the second lowest median chance of 8.7%. However, far less research is targeted at step 6, with the lowest median chance of 2.7%. That is, research focuses much more on increasing the odds of saving enough info in the freezing process, and much less on ensuring that orgs will preserve frozen patients for long enough. 

Yet we seems to have an obvious way to greatly increase the step 6 chance, at the cost of a modest cut of the step 3 chance: fixation. If we used chemical bonds to fix proteins in place, we could store cryonics patients at much closer to room temperature, and then they’d not need to be stored or managed by centralized orgs that could fail. Full-body patients could be buried as mummies in caskets, while brain-only patients could be squirreled away in small ~1300cc containers. They might be stored in secret locations, perhaps in isolated permafrost, perhaps with pointers to those locations stored and protected cryptographically, only to be revealed to an advanced civ later.

Yes, fixation makes restarting biology harder, but that isn’t much of an obstacle to brain emulation, which seems to me pretty sure to the first feasible revival tech. And I suspect most of these respondents low median estimate of 2.7% for step 6 didn’t take into account the bad news of a likely several centuries long innovation fall due to falling population, bad news that should greatly lower the chances of cryonics orgs maintaining their structure and plans for long enough.

Yes, I have big doubts that the key cryonics marketing puzzle is best explained by this sort of rational choice framework. And I’ll try to post later on other explanations. Even so, this rational choice analysis suggests some plausible marketing strategies. First, try a lot harder to show potential customers that the chances of failure on steps 1,2,4,5 are lower than they think. Second, switch to fixation, so that patients could be stored near room temperature. If step 3’s chance falls from 8.7% to 5%, while step 6’s chance rises from 2.7% to 50%, that’s a gain of a factor of 11. Combined with a factor of 16 gain on steps 1,2,4,5 would give a new product of 0.19%, and a new total of 11%. So there’s some hope here.

Added 25Jul: My estimates for 8 steps: 90%, 90%, 50%, 80%, 90%, 15%, 95%, 95%, giving product of 4%. With fixation that rises to 18%.