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Via Marginal Revolution:
If [cryonics] works, the benefits are high, and the probability of it working is greater than zero. Yet few people sign up for it. I think that we are afraid of looking weird if we sign up for it.
The way to think about how and why people make decisions is to look at costs and benefits - which go far beyond mere money, of course. The discussion in the post revolves around "looking weird" as a cost. That's important for we folk descended from apes, possessed of a deep-seated and hardwired need for peer validation. Other costs exist, such as the need to get up and sort out paperwork - people die and become sick in many ways through similar laziness, especially in health matters stretched across the years. I think the comments to the post demonstrate that the more important costs are the perceived financial ones, however.
I suspect the eccentric childless millionaire demographic is overrepresented. Who else can afford it?
People look at the pay-at-the-door cost of cryonic suspension and decide they can't afford it, that cryonics is only for the rich. That is very much not the case, however. Next to no-one pays for their suspension in a lump sum at the door. Instead it's done via assignment of a life insurance policy for a very small number of dollars per month. There have been very few cryosuspensions of extremely wealthy people.
This suggests to me that if cryonics organizations want to grow, they should stop outsourcing organization of payment. Cryonics should be marketed from the very first touch to the potential customer as an insurance service you pay for monthly: people understand that, and do it all the time. What you are buying is cryosuspension should you be unfortunate enough to die, and the cryonics company handles the mechanisms of insurance - or however else the finances are sorted out - behind the scenes.
Monthly income for a company also allows for the sort of growth and professionalization that has been a challenge in the cryonics industry under the present model of funding for research and development. All in all, a potential win-win situation. One might ask why it hasn't been tried yet.
Posted by Reason at July 15, 2008 7:36 AM
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