Roko... you must have been dealing with small scale cryonics. I am an engineer in the LNG industry, and we routinely design cryogenic storage tanks up to 200,000 m3 in volume. Vacuum is never used on this scale, in fact we use pearlite powder insulation and wood blocks to support the inner liner, and glass or polyurethane foam to insulate the shell. The PU foam is cheap and can be more or less as thick as you wish. Heat loss for LNG tanks is around 5 watts/sqm, for large tanks this represents a boil-off of around 1/50th of 1% per day. I'm sure this can be lowered. $100 million will buy a 140,000 m3 tank. If you want one, let me know :)

(AFAIK, powder is also used in vacuum flasks instead of multiple layers).

I used to be a cryogenic engineer. My impression is that the cost of a large-scale cryonics grave would be high, on the order of $50-100M because of the reliability required of the vacuum and the extreme insulation requirements.

By my estimate, such a container could hold up to 125000 heads, at $800 each. Very affordable. On the other hand, if you needed a coffin-size space for full body, the price would be more like $25000.

Thanks for linking to that. I was having a hard time remembering where I had read about all this stuff. From the same article:

There is one bright spot. Below -100°C, the water in biological systems is finally all frozen, and molecules can't move to react. We use cryoprotectants that have the effect of preventing freezing, but somewhere around -135°C they all have glass transition points, becoming so viscous that molecules can't move and undergo chemical change. While the table indicates that staying below -150°C is safe from a rate of reaction standpoint, in fact any temperature below -130°C to -135°C is probably safe due to elimination of translational molecular movement as a result of vitrification.

In other words, the effect at -135C in terms of molecules being locked in place is better than before the glass transition is occurred. I assume he means in addition to the Arrhenius effect. The main reason for cooling in a cryogen like LN2 directly is the fact that its boiling point keeps the system at a constant temperature easily at a small scale. Scaled up, keeping the temperature constant should prove less of a challenge, or at least cheaper (per unit volume) to solve.

How many resources are we spending to save and improve lives of apes?

How many resources are we spending to save and improve lives of the mentally retarded? My cursory research has over half a billion U.S. dollars in the United States in the year 2002.

I've wondered if the revived people might end up as an underclass, or as several underclasses.

Er, do you have an issue with any of the arguments, rather than with Eliezer or the karma system? The only critique I can see above is the exact objection that's discussed in the "particular proof" post, and you're not presenting any argument against the analysis there.

I can't claim that the karma here is unbiased, but one pattern I can point to is that LW contrarians who engage with particular objections get upvoted more than contrarians who just reiterate conclusions. I've pointed you to a specific argument that in rationally making important decisions under uncertainty, one has to make do with the evidence that can be gathered at the time of decision (and there really is a wealth of such evidence in the case of cryonics). Do you disagree with this general principle or with this application, and if so, on what grounds?

That's lovely and all. But how is it that my question got voted down and this nothing response got voted up?

Is it because I refer to people in cryostasis as corpse popsicles?

Well, the "nothing response" had links, and included actual facts.

As a general rule of thumb, in any online forum that uses a karma system, remarks which are polite and well written are more likely to be voted up. Remarks which are insulting or seem to be quickly typed up with little thought are more likely to be downvoted. Now, there's also a general trend that comments which agree with the general attitude in a forum are more likely to be voted up than comments which do not. All these details apply to LW. Although LW prides itself on trying to be rational, and one could argue that comments which agree with the consensus here are simply more likely to be rational, I suspect that some amount of simply agreeing with what someone is saying does lead to upvoting. However, this seems to be less of a problem at LW than elsewhere (especially compare say Slashdot and Reddit). Now, there's one other aspect that's very important, the two factors (agreement with status quo, and quality of post) don't combine in a nicely linear fashion. In particular, comments which do not seem well thought out or indicate a lack of knowledge about a topic and which go against the status quo consensus are likely to be voted down a lot.

In that regard, your repeated use of the phrase "corpse popsicles" was apparently an indication of an attempt at emotionalism, something which really doesn't go over well at LW. Moreover, it also demonstrates a lack of detailed familiarity with cryonics since one would otherwise know that the standard derogatory pourmanteau is "corpsicle" rather than the long phrase "corpse popsicle." (I'm under the tentative impression that this is actually a pourmanteau of corpse and icicle)

The last link you posted was especially unhelpful since I am inclined to discredit the source for reasons that I have already commented on.

This is the sort of thing that is probably getting you voted down. It wasn't at all clear (and after rereading what you've wrote still isn't at all clear) why you discredit that source. It might help for you to state what exactly in that link you object to.

Note that comments that discuss potential problems with cryonics are not in general downvoted. For example, my comment here was not downvoted (granted a single upvote isn't much but the point is clear).

In general when posting a comment in an environment which does not by and large support your view it is extremely important to make a comment as polite and well-reasoned as you can. Directly insulting the people one is addressing may make one feel good, but it is unlikely to actually change anyone's opinion. Moreover, it is the sort of thing which generally causes bystanders and audiences to not favor your opinion. This will likely still be true for otherwise pretty rational individuals. And judging from your remarks here and in previous posts on LW you seem to have a low opinion of the general level of rationality here. If you are correct in that assessment then it is even more important that you don't trigger hostile emotions in the people you are trying to convince.

In my experience, it's quite fruitless to get into the discussion of evidence on this particular problem. That's because it's absolutely clear that cryonics (on current evidence) does not work. The entire argument in favor of cryonics is based on projections for future discoveries and technologies, which any cryonics proponent will admit. Thus their argument is not really an argument based on evidence -- it is more of an argument based on expectation. Now, this expectation may very well be solid and well justified, but in my experience, the LW community tends to really bastardize the argument and claim that the evidence is somehow solid and well worked out. To the extent that you should dish out a lot of money, starting now. This goes so far as to the IMO absurd idea in ciphergoth's post above, whereby he states that the burden of proof or evidence should be put on the cryonics critics.

Perhaps Sam can clarify his remarks but that's strongly not what I got from the context. That argument has some validity, but he actually wrote:

How in the world can you assign any value to that proposal? There is a total lack of evidence in support of resurrecting a frozen human because its never been done and as of now nobody knows if it is even possible. So essentially cryonics is a way to spend money on a one in a million chance you might be revived in the future. Why? I would much rather bet on life extension then cryonics.

He didn't say one needs to assign low value to the probability that it will happen but had a problem assigning "any value" due to a "total lack of evidence." That sounds like a much stronger claim especially when he then refers to making a "bet" by comparison on life extension. If that is what Sam meant, I'd be particularly curious what the monetary level would be where he'd sign up.

Incidentally, the claim that because a technology does not yet exist we must assign it a very low probability of arising seems almost trivially false. The largest hard drives today are in the 2-4 terabyte range. I'm pretty willing to bet that we will see 10 terabyte hard drives pretty soon and almost certainly will eventually. The only major ways for this not to happen are a very large scale catastrophe or the discovery of new technologies that render large hard drives unnecessary. Thus, the tiny chance of this not occurring is even smaller if one instead talks about compact data storage objects in the 10 TB range.

One can use other examples which are slightly less trivial. Currently, the best Go programs are in the mid to low dan rankings. But I don't think anyone seriously thinks that because no one has demonstrated a better program that the probability of such programs arising is therefore very low.

The argument type used fails even more badly when one is talking about something like cryonics where we don't even need the technology soon, it just needs to eventually exist.

This argument might be different if Sam focused on technical aspects that would make cryonics difficult in the long-term or if one focused on sociological aspects (which he did briefly touch upon but not in any detail). But the argument being dealt with by my comment seems to focus simply on the claimed lack of "evidence" due to the technology not yet existing. That style argument fails.

Take your beliefs seriously. If you believe something, you must accept all consequences; if you don't accept some consequences, you must stop believing. The alternative is hypocrisy, compartmentalization, curiosity-stopping.

Paying money is a decision made based on your beliefs, not the other way around. You are not allowed to change your beliefs based on the decisions your beliefs suggest, only on evidence pertaining to the beliefs themselves.

M, but that doesn't seem to be what SamAdams said. He didn't just say the probability was low enough for it to not be worth it, he said "There is a total lack of evidence in support of resurrecting a frozen human because its never been done and as of now nobody knows if it is even possible." Admittedly, he did say immediately afterward, "So essentially cryonics is a way to spend money on a one in a million chance you might be revived in the future. " So that seems to be a little inconsistent? I would think that if things really were as he described before, one in a million would be quite an overestimate.

So would it be right to say your objection is based on the expected utility of working cryonics instead of its probability?

I want him to go away. Not go and preserve himself so we're stuck with him forever.

While I appreciate this display of cruelty (it's high-status and fun), I believe it is a moral error to exert control (in any nontrivial amount) towards murdering a person.

Ok, this is the point where I decide to be mildly obnoxious and use Sam's work as an indication that humans have many more cognitive biases and fallacies than even people at LW realize. In particular, the above post displays a large amount of artificial classification in trying to claim that specific scale issues somehow become differences in kind. This seems very similar to (for example) creationists who claim to accept microevolution but not macroevolution. Moreover, the presence of these problems does not leave in some cases even after prolonged exposure to careful rational and critical thinking.

The fourth point does a good example of this:

Cryonics has many single-points of failure and many unresolved questions: A couple examples: a.) Is there anything fundamental about death the precludes the possibility of restoring life? b.) Is it possible to maintain self/person-hood by simply maintaing physical state integrity? c.) Is the general concept of organ preservation able to be scaled to entire bodies or is there a limit to what can be restarted? d.) Is a living organism required to overcome the effects of the cryopreservation? etc.

To be sure, there are other problems here as well (such as the heavy overlap between a,b and c and the fact that a seems to take "death" as a potentially ontological fundamental phenomenon), but the issue I want to focus on is c, "is the general concept of organ preservation able to be scaled to entire bodies or is there a limit to what can be restarted?" This is an assertion that while any single part of a system can be restarted, somehow it takes a much higher burden of evidence to assert that the entire system can be restarted. This seems similar to the micro/macro fallacy but I'm not sure what precisely the fallacy is. I'd almost be tempted to coin a new one, something like "failure to reduce."

I have to wonder if this sort of thing is an indication that LW is not substantially succeeding in improving rationality. Sam's first comment on LW was about a year ago, and his posting quality has either remained the same or declined during that time (although to be fair it is difficult to distinguish between rationality and civility issues in his case.) Now, it seems based on comments Sam has made that it is probable that he hasn't read the sequences. Sam's emphasis on wanting to only read "authorities" may play a role but that may be simply a specific defense in this case against reading posts which challenge his worldview (the strongest evidence for this case is that people have summarized the demand for particular proof argument and he's still ignoring or misinterpreting it) . Is Sam a representative sample? If there are a substantial number of people here who have gone through and interacted with the community and yet have not improved their rationality, does that suggest we have a problem that requires a change in tactics?

Sam certainly isn't the only example of this sort of problem, and even the general community here sometimes demonstrates strong biases that impact their evaluation of claims(I've noticed this most strongly where evaluations of historical claims are concerned). So, are we succeeding? Should the presence of people like Sam mean we should be concerned that we are not?

Is it established that molecular nanotech is required? Uploading might be possible with scanning technology of sufficient speed and accuracy, for example. Just because someone three hundred years ago might have suggested that flapping wings was necessary to flight doesn't mean that the technology that eventually succeeds need use them.

Point taken. Complex machinery on the inside seems like it would be a pain to maintain. A hoist that lowers patients from the top could be simplest. Computer controlled for precision and safety (perhaps still human operated).

Rather than shelves, I suspect steel boxes of a cubic meter or more would be used to contain the patients. Stacking the heads in a heap sounds like a recipe for crushed skulls and mixed-up brain matter. (Though who knows what nanotech can solve, eh?) In the cold-air version of the system (above LN2 temperature), these would act as heat sink and thermal conductor while providing strength. Fans would probably also be used to circulate the air to prevent stratification.

Stacking directly in LN2 might prove interesting. A reason to use cold-air temperatures over LN2 might be to make the stacking mechanism easier to design. Remember, the process of stacking patients is only going to take a few years, and it can be filled with cryogen later.

Cooling to LN2 temps over that last few degrees could be done at a rate that takes months (or even years), which I assume would induce fewer cracks. Then it would be filled with LN2. If we use the steel boxes, the inside of the boxes might need to be filled as well in which case they would need to have openings. (Perhaps they should be cages rather than solid boxes.) This is just to maximize cryogen volume; you could always keep it cool by just cooling the outside.