Cryonics

[ciphergoth]

I'm considering signing up with the Cryonics Institute. Are you signed up? I'd be interested to hear your reasons why or why not. It does of course sound crazy, but when you press past that initial reaction to find out why it's crazy, I haven't heard a really satisfactory argument yet, and I'm interested to hear what people think. There are many reasons it might not work, but are there reasons to think it's really unlikely to work? How likely does recovery need to be for it to be worth it?

Comments

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

You should certainly expect that the insurance company will make considerably more on the deal than you pay them. They will budget for a profit even after all their costs. This is how insurance works - there's no
magic that turns small sums into large ones, it's just risk pooling. The expectation value for the holder of an insurance policy is less than its cost to the holder. Or the insurer goes bust, which is the another way things go wrong.

The other thing you're missing is inflation. £30k now will pay for a budget freezing but it certainly won't in 40 years' time, unless we have had cataclysmic deflation.

[lovingboth]

An indication as to how much is made from term life insurance is the way that when we did it around JA's birth, the first 15 months of premiums went to pay the commission. So the insurer gets no money for more than the first year of a 18 year policy and still expects to profit.