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Pavitra comments on The Threat of Cryonics - Less Wrong
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Yeah, that's a good point.
And yet... reading the list, I don't so much get the impression that cryonics is unscamlike as that it belongs to a different genre of scam.
But I notice that I am rationalizing, and I need to go update.
ETA: No, I see now. Cryonics resembles-in-genre a religion. If you follow a certain burial rite, you will have eternal life in a better world. People generate religious objections: they say that it is morally wrong, that it destroys the immortal soul. People treat cryonics as though accepting it as valid would require them to give up their religious beliefs, even if those beliefs are actually compatible with cryonics.
Furthermore, cryonics doesn't sell itself as a religion: it doesn't claim to have answers to the great terrible questions that unsettle the mind. So people looking for a new religion tend not to choose it.
This leaves open the question of why cryonics is uncommon among self-professed atheists. Do so few "unbelievers" truly disbelieve?
I strongly suspect that it is more common per-capita among atheists than theists. If that is so, it suggests that maybe cryonics is fooling some atheists by setting off their religion-alarms, and/or the like-a-religion objection is only one of a suite of reasons why cryonics is unpopular.
Cryonics may be less uncommon among atheists than among theists, but that's not what interests me.
Being cryopreserved is much more uncommon among atheists than not being cryopreserved is among atheists. That requires explanation.
The absurdity heuristic is a good enough explanation to first order.
The fact that cryonics is becoming more, not less, common is (weak) evidence that there's good reasoning behind it; this evidence can be improved by noting that most irrational fast-growing fringe movements (i.e. Jehovah's Witnesses) achieve their growth via making members afraid that they will lose out if they don't evangelize. Cryonics doesn't have that dynamic†.
† Even though cryonics would be cheaper if it were more popular, that's more of a group coordination problem than an urgent personal incentive. I don't see a lot of cryonics advocates feeling pressured to evangelize for it, just a lot of people who happen to think that they're obviously right on the issue.
As was pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the absurdity heuristic alone doesn't explain why cryonics is significantly less common than, say, Raëlism.
I don't know the cause or cure, but I think geeks tend to be lousy at publicity.
Tentative theory-- they're independent-minded enough that they can't really model people who want a little pixie dust (aka status, supernormal stimuli, or fantasies of value) sprinkled on things. Alternate theory: geeks like pixie dust, too, but it's a different sort of pixie dust.
nitpick,; not all geeks are aspiring rationalists.