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ciphergoth comments on Cryonics Wants To Be Big - Less Wrong
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Could you break down your objection?
EDIT to look at it from another angle: it's clear that the first serve in this discussion has to come from the cryonicists, since we're the ones trying to change people's minds. But cryonicists have served and served and served; there's a massive literature arguing in favour, of which I'd pick out Ben Best's "Scientific Justification of Cryonics Practice". If you don't feel that anything in that literature is enough to show that cryonics might be a good idea, you're going to have to make some sort of actual return to those serves, at least to be more specific about what you feel is missing from them that could and should be there to justify signing up. Because as I've shown, no-one is even trying to return any of those serves.
I understand that there is work supporting the idea that cryonics/regeneration/etc. will eventually be successful. However, I don't feel the need to respond to this work very directly, because this work, after all, is very indirect, in the sense that it is only making plausibility arguments. As a cryonics skeptic, I am not attempting to rule out the plausibility or possibility of cryonics. After all, it seems fairly plausible that this stuff will eventually get worked out, as with the usual arguments for technological advancement. As a cryonics skeptic, I am only asserting that there is insufficient evidence that it will work for my personal freezing/revival to justify my substantial investment.
The response to this might be to claim that I am unfairly or erroneously making "demands for particular proof". I think that this point is an intelligent point, but that it is being somewhat abused or overused in this context. In areas like physics or biology, it is completely status-quo to believe nothing except that which has been shown by fairly direct evidence. You might even abstractly characterize the entirety of professional science as an area in which "demands for particular proof" are the centralizing, unifying, distinguishing feature. Seeing as how cryonics is essentially an area of physics and biology, I view it in much the same way. I expect to see more concrete proof of its ability before being willing to believe in it, invest in it, or rely on it for my supposed personal immortality.
You're saying the level of confidence to look for is one that would be appropriate for any new medical treatment, rather than (say) the confidence you'd look for when making a change in foreign policy.
One reason we're so demanding in the realm of medical evidence is because we can be, and since it can be life and death, if we can be we probably should be. In the case of a pill, we can do an RCT, providing high quality, repeatable statistical evidence on its efficacy - so anyone proposing I take a pill who doesn't have an RCT backing them up is a bit suspicious. In the case of cryonics, I hope it's clear that it's not because of a lack of respect for evidence that we're unable to show you an RCT.
There is absolutely insufficient evidence to have the same confidence in cryonics as we do in, say, ibuprofen for reducing inflammation. Because of this lack of evidence, we have great uncertainty. What we're trying to ask is, in the face of that uncertainty, how will you make a decision? Is it always appropriate in the medical sphere to choose inaction whenever the evidence in favour of action is only weak and circumstantial?