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wedrifid comments on Normal Cryonics - Less Wrong
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Do you know why cryonics is not more heavily advertised? Thinking about it for 30 seconds gives me some hypotheses but I'm too socially distant to make a reliable guess.
I like the mockery explanation. Cryonics is as about as socially acceptable as furry fandom; if furries scraped up a few millions for some TV spots, do you think they would get more or less members in the long run? There is such a thing as bad publicity.
And existing cryonics members might be exasperated - money used for advertising is money not used for research or long-term sustainability (I hear Alcor runs at a loss).
I'm pretty sure that at the root, most furries are furries because of anthropomorphized animal cartoon shows. I think a well designed commercial could push a lot of people over the edge.
Thanks, now I have an entertaining conspiracy theory about Avatar.
Source ? A non-sustainable cryonics organization is one you don't want to be signed up with. These dewars use electricity (EDIT: oops, no they don't; substitute "rental for the space to store them").
You still need to create the nitrogen in the first place.
But you can read the financial statements yourself: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/financial.html (Seriously, am I the only person here who can look things up? The answers are on, like, page 10.)
I should mention that I define 'running at a loss' as not being able to pay all bills out of either investment income or out of fees (membership dues, freezing fees, etc.); if there is a gap between expenses and the former, then they are running at a loss and depending on the charity of others to make it up.
And this is the case. In 2008, they spent $1.7 million - but they got 622k for freezing, and ~300k in fees & income, for a total of $990,999. In other words, Alcor is not currently self-sustaining.
(Why aren't they bankrupt? Because of $1,357,239 in 'contributions, gifts, and grants', and 'noncash contributions' of $753,979.)
Thanks, that's useful info.
This is a myth. Techno-filia is very much part of our culture. Science fiction dominates our movies. People would scramble to sign up for cryonics if the infrastructure was there and they were certain it wasn't a scam. But that's a big IF. And that's the IF -- this idea of parents not choosing cryonics because they're lousy parents is a huge MYTH invented right on the spot. Parents don't have access to cryonics.
(If a cryonics company is reading this: I do suggest an ad campaign. I think the image you project should be 'safe household product': something completely established and solid that people can sign up for and sign out of easily -- just a basic, mundane service. No complications and lots of options. People aren't signing they're life away, they're buying a service. And it's just suspension till a later date -- I'd stay well clear of any utopian pseudo-religious stuff.)
AFAICT your statement is simply false.
I won't try to judge the original statement, but I do think that people believing cryonics to be a scam is a serious problem -- much more serious than I would have believed. I have talked to some friends (very bright friends with computer science backgrounds, in the process of getting college degrees) about the idea, and a shockingly large number of them seemed quite certain that Alcor was a scam. I managed to dissuade maybe one of those, but in the process I think I convinced at least one more that I was a sucker.
Reasoning by perceptual recognition. Cryonics seems weird and involves money, therefore it's perceptually recognized as a scam. The fact that it would be immensely labor-intensive to develop the suspension tech, isn't marketed well or at all really, and would have a very poor payoff on invested labor as scams go, will have little impact on this. The lightning-fast perceptual system hath spoken.
I'm surprised that you say your friends are computer programmers. Programmers need to be capable of abstract thought.
It has struck me that if you wanted to set out to create a profitable scam, cryonics looks like quite a good idea. I don't have any particular reason to think that actual cryonics companies are a scam but it does seem like something of a perfect crime. It's almost like a perfect Ponzi scheme.
This would require cryonics companies to lie about their finances. Otherwise they have no way to extract money from their reserves without alarming customers.
Banks have been lying about their finances for years. Cryonics companies would hardly be unusual in the current economic climate if they were lying about their finances. I have some AAA rated mortgage backed securities for sale if anyone's interested.
Banks hide their deception not only in actual secrecy but also in overwhelming complexity.
Currently it is set up as a bit of a Ponzi scheme; without new people coming in (and donations) these companies wouldn't survive very long. But then, with a little tweaking you could apply that analysis to any business with customers to make it look like a Ponzi scheme.
Could you write this up in more detail somewhere? The claim is that the "patient care trust" doesn't need new customers to be financially viable, and should keep going even if the primary business fails. If this isn't true it would be worth drawing attention to.
Alcor is running at a loss
I do believe they would be capable of running within their means if they had to.
For some value of "running at a loss", i.e. where you interpret that as "would run at a loss if it weren't for donations and bequests".
Given the nature of their business, donations and bequests do not strike me as an anomalous source of revenue. I do plan on asking for more information on the nature of these revenues before signing up.
However, this is an issue quite separate from the viability of the patient care trust, which is set up to keep suspendees as they are even in the case of a failure of the "main business".
Most businesses deliver a product or service to their customers much sooner after receiving their money than a cryonics company does. Those customers also tend to be alive and so in a position to complain if they are not satisfied with their purchase.
Let's try to make this concrete.
Suppose I choose CI, and pay up now for a lifetime membership. I will pay $1250 once, and in parallel build up $200K insurance policy designating CI as the beneficiary. The only part of the money CI sees now is the $1.2K. No small sum, but neither it is more than a tiny fraction of the salaries and costs CI verifiably pays.
At 40, I can reasonably expect to go 30 to 40 years before I die. At any time during this period, if it becomes apparent that CI is up to anything screwy, I can (so I understand) change my insurance policy back; or at any rate contest their claim to it.
If you want to defraud customers, there are quicker, cheaper, more reliable ways to do it.
There are people currently being stored are there not?
Yes, I encountered this too from several of my friends. One was almost mockingly certain that I was considering giving money to a group of scamsters, though they had no specific comments on Alcor or CI's published financial information.
(For the record for when people I know find this post -- I have not actually overcome the inertia and signed up. This is largely due to the fact that my living relatives are likely to have control over the disposition of my remains, so there is little point in signing up for cryonics unless I can get up the nerve to talk to them about it.)
Why? It'll be a huge boost for cryonics when the first person is brought back. People will be able to see with their own eyes, for the first time, that it actually works. Until then, it's still speculative.
"certain it would work" != "certain it's not a scam"
Things that work are usually not called scams.
Pills that cure cancer for $5000 a month are scams. People who can contact deceased loved ones are offering scams.
Whether the people who provide the service believe in their service or not, services that rely on technology we don't have available yet are scams. I'm sure that there are people in Alcor who feel extra pressure, knowing that if cryonics doesn't work, they're essentially scamming their members.
Even in a world where cryonics works, we could imagine a "cryonics scam" where a company took money for cryonics and then didn't freeze/revive people.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "work". If I gave my money to a cryonics company and and they purposely didn't freeze me or revive me, I would say that it didn't work.
But we're talking about whether or not people would trust it wasn't a scam, even if it wasn't.
If the infrastructure for something is in place then people usually do trust that it isn't a scam. (Infrastructure often means safeguards against scamming anyway.) Most people trust hospitals to provide medical care.
Well, actually that's a good example. Even though hospitals have a lot of infrastructure throughout the country, people still have a limited trust in them. There are often good reasons for this. And then people are supposed to turn around and have boundless faith in the operations of a tiny, private, nearly secret company?
The point is the other side of the implication: things that are not scams don't always work.
You are thinking of scam in the sense of 'deliberate fraud'. A quick survey of definitions on the web support your sense as by far the dominant one, and mine more or less non-existent. I was meaning scam in the sense of wasting your money, and certainly including the case of deliberate fraud.
Think about it from the point of view of the mother that must make smart economical decisions in order to make sure the bills are paid each month; if she told me that cryonics was a 'scam' I would understand her meaning.
I think Eliezer describes this sense of scam quite well here, because indeed it doesn't make a difference for this sense if the cryonics companies have good intentions, and are working really intensively, and are in the hole financially. I just disagree there is any problem with this quick perception, from that mother's point of view. She's still thinking, 'a fool and his money are easily parted'.
I'm not such a mother. I bought two of those "One Laptop Per Child" OLPC laptops for $400 two years ago. I was willing to invest in an idea I cared about, even though it didn't seem like it was going to work.
Were they a scam? I think they had great intentions ... but if there isn't a child somewhere with a laptop because of my purchase, then, yes, they were. Even if this is just because OLPC hadn't anticipated that adults would take the laptops and resell them.
And, finally, I don't know for certain but I suspect that many of the medium-type persons that contact relatives and tell fortunes have sincere intentions of some kind.
Now that you've discovered the standard meaning of the phrase "scam", I think it would be best if we stuck to it rather than gratuitously switching to a private language. Perhaps there is another term that covers the whole category of expenditures that don't work out the way you want.
Why?
EDIT: Why are you sure of this, I mean.
Because I'm sure that some of them have good intentions. They might know that they're doing their best to give people a chance, but if they're human (?) they would also feel the responsibility of all these people depending upon them.
All you say in this comment seems true, but not the part in your previous comment about "if cryonics doesn't work, they're essentially scamming their members."
If I pay firefighters to extinguish the fire that is burning down my house, and they try, do the best they can under the conditions they have to work in, but my house still burns down in the end, have they scammed me?
I don't think "scam" is the right word.
I'm sure the employees of cryonics organizations would be extremely disappointed if cryonics somehow didn't work, and they would probably feel sad for the loss of many potential lives, but if they actually tried their best, I highly doubt that they'd feel like they did something morally wrong or scam-like.
AFAIK, no serious Cryonics organization with actual facilities is guaranteeing a result (being revived). In legalese, it's a "best efforts obligation" rather than an "obligation to achieve a specific result".
AFAYCT? You think most Americans are irrational. Why would you expect to have a good model of how they think?
Take sexing of babies. At first, 'people' were vocal about how it wouldn't be natural to know the baby's sex, and people still extol the virtues of 'being surprised' when the baby is born. But it was something doctors offered and over time, pragmatic people ignored critical voices and started doing it, and culture changed.
Culture is changed by being normal. 'People' probably dislike the idea of cryonics because you connect it with singularity concepts -- your utopia is not everyone's utopia. Let them imagine their own future.
Your comment is not internally consistent. You present a model which predicts that people will not sign up for cryonics even if they think it is not a scam.
It's a generally true thing, not a worked out linear argument.
I contend that parents don't have access to cryonics. The rest is just random bullets of indignation.
Which just goes to say, you see what I'm saying? There you go.
Yes, and the fact that they contradict one another is significant to me.
Well the first contradiction was that I was giving ad advice to a company I accused of being elitist. The contradiction was not lost upon me; but if I have a probability that they're doing X, I can hedge by also betting on Y. Anyway, a cryonics company isn't a monolith; I'm sure they've got their different internal perspectives. Which leads to my second set of contradictions about people -- but people aren't a monolith either.
Young husbands will go along with cryonics because they like Terminator, and 40-something mothers will go along with cryonics because there isn't a cure for that chromosomal anomaly now but there might be in 5 years. Or maybe it will buy someone extra time to have another baby to provide cord blood. The problem is trying to sell them a vision of a weird far distant future instead of just providing a service.
I think byrnema has a point. I don't think most people are even aware that cryonics isn't sci-fi anymore.
Anecdote: I read sci-fi as a kid, learned of the concept of cryonics, thought it was a good idea if it worked... and then it never occurred to me to research whether it was a real technology. Surely I would have heard of it if it was?
Then years later I ran into a mention on OvercomingBias and signed up pretty much immediately.
The way people say "it's science fiction" as if it tells you anything at all about the plausibility of what's under discussion drives me crazy. Doctor Who and communications satellites are both science fiction.