I'm writing to recommend something awesome to anyone who's recently signed up for cryonics (and to the future self of anyone who's about to do so). Robin Hanson has a longstanding offer that anyone who's newly signed up for cryonics can have an hour's discussion with him on any topic, and I took him up on that last week.
I expected to have a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion on various facets of futurism. My expectations were exceeded. Even if you've been reading Overcoming Bias for a long time, talking with Robin is an order of magnitude more stimulating/persuasive/informative than reading OB or even watching him debate someone else, and I'm now reconsidering my thinking on a number of topics as a result.
So if you've recently signed up, email Robin; and if you're intending to sign up, let this be one more incentive to quit procrastinating!
Relevant links:
The LessWrong Wiki article on cryonics is a good place to start if you have a bunch of questions about the topic.
If you want to argue about whether signing up for cryonics is a good idea, two good and relatively recent threads on that subject are under the posts on A survey of anti-cryonics writing and More Cryonics Probability Estimates.
And if you are cryocrastinating (you've decided that you should sign up for cryonics, but you haven't yet), here's a LW thread about taking the first step.
Having looked through the cryonics insurance options, I am having trouble justifying one vs a regular life insurance.
I think that an accident resulting in death makes cryo insurance a loss both to the insured and the estate, as the odds of both brain remaining intact and timely freezing are quite bad. So all you have left is the altruistic feeling of financing a cryo organization. If that's what you are after, donate explicitly.
If you get too demented or brain-damaged to handle your affairs, getting frozen is probably not a good idea anyway, since most of your personality is gone by then, and the odds of recovery are almost non-existent.
If you have a life insurance and get terminally ill, there are several ways to draw cash against the policy's value while you are still alive, and fund your cryosuspension that way.
If you want to guard against greedy relatives, (Rudi Hoffman's example), then drawing cash from your life insurance policy while still alive seems like a way to do it.
In summary, I am hard pressed to find a probable situation where a cryo insurance is preferable to a general whole life or universal life insurance, unless you have no one but yourself to care about. What am I missing here?
After the failure of the Cryonics Society of New York (CSNY, not to be confused with this or this), due in part to their acceptance of cases whose families promised to pay in installments but later reneged (causing them to run out of money for keeping their other patients cryopreserved), the remaining cryonics organizations require ironclad assurance of payment for suspension. That's really hard to arrange if you die without a few months' notice, even if you have an insurance policy, since your beneficiaries won't have the money to give to the organization for a few weeks or months after your death (for which time you'd be on dry ice, and undergoing a small but worrisome amount of degradation). Naming the organization as a beneficiary gives them 100% assurance that the suspension will be paid for, and without that they won't send out the suspension team.
(Someone correct me if I'm mistaken in this account.)