Cryonics is a popular topic among the rationalist community but not the utilitarian community. My impression is that most people who promote Cryonics are generally not utilitarians and most utilitarians do not promote Cryonics.
This seems to be one area where the rationalist and EA communities diverge significantly. My take is that typically those excited in Cryonics are typically in it for somewhat selfish (not in a bad way, just different from utilitarian) reasons, and that there haven't been many attempts to justify it as utilitarian because that wasn't the original intention.
I can imagine some interesting arguments for Cryonics as an effective intervention, but I haven't heard many others give these arguments, and I'm reluctant to steel man a cause for a reason its believers don't care about.
I wanted to open this up for the discussion. I would hope we can roughly come to a consensus on which of the following is true:
1) There is a strong case for cryonics being an effective monetary intervention, and the math has been done to support this.
2) Cryonics can be an effective career intervention for someone with a large amount of career capital in the field, but not for others.
3) There is very little case for cryonics as an effective utilitarian intervention, though it could make sense for other philosophical systems or people with moral uncertainty.
Other questions:
1) If there is no Hedonistic Utilitarian case for Cryonics, are there any strong Effective Altruist cases for it?
2) How much of the above applies to life extension research?
One advantage of life extension is that it might prompt people to think in a more long-term-focused way, which might be nice for solving coordination problems and x-risks.
Some people think that they are able to think more clearly about the future as a result of being signed up for cryonics, because they aren't as scared of death and don't need to rationalize that eg the Singularity will happen in their lifetimes.
In cryonicists' defense, I've never heard them say that they buy cryonics from their EA budget; it seems to be a personal spending thing.
I'm totally ok with people agreeing to spend money on it, but not from their EA budget, and acknowledging that.
Agree it definitely has some long term advantages, curious how we can estimate those.
I find the argument "I'm so afraid of dying and believe in cyronics so much that signing up for cryonics would end many of my worries and let me be far more productive" kind of humorous, though imagine that it could be true for a very small set of people.