Christopher Hitchens and Cryonics

James_Miller

Christopher Hitchens is probably dying of cancer. Hitchens is a well known author, journalist and militant atheist. Having read much of his work I believe he is also a very high IQ rationalist who enjoys being provocative. He has written "I am quietly resolved to resist bodily as best I can, even if only passively, and to seek the most advanced advice."

Hitchens should be extremely receptive to cryonics. Convincing him to signup would do much for the cryonics movement in part because he would immediately become our most articulate member.

I have written to him about cryonics, but I suspect he is getting tens of thousands of emails and probably won't ever even read mine. I propose that the Less Wrong community attempt to get Hitchens to at least seriously consider cryonics. We could do this by mass emailing him and by linking to this blogpost.

Here is an article in which he talks about his cancer. His email address is at the end of the article.

Hitchens should be extremely receptive to cryonics. Convincing him to signup would do much for the cryonics movement in part because he would immediately become our most articulate member.

Here is an article in which he talks about his cancer. His email address is at the end of the article.

Are Skeptics known to ever change their minds?

I got a bit disappointed, when it seemed to be a group of people that shout basic level cached ideas about religion and new age around. How rational are they actually? A skeptic is no singularist, but at least he should not stop at the easily refuted counterarguments.

12Kevin16y

Christopher Hitchens demonstrated a great ability to change his mind. He agreed to be waterboarded and it took him less than 10 seconds to change his mind about whether or not waterboarding was torture.

6Risto_Saarelma16y

I'm having a hard time thinking about topics they should have changed their minds about from recent years. Most of the stuff skeptics argue is so terribly wrong that there isn't much chance of anything sensible ever coming out of it, and skeptics end up being more like sanity waterline plumbers than scientists. There might be an analogy to psychiatry made here. Psychiatrists deal with genuinely diseased thinking day in and day out, so if they had to assess some genuinely novel philosophy, there might be some trouble. The most high-profile case where the scientific fringe ended up being right and skeptics had a serious opportunity for changing their minds I can think of was continental drift 50 years ago. Someone will probably want to suggest the many-worlds interpretation here. If the arguments that have been around here that internalizing MWI would actually make people change how they behave do hold, this would actually be a good example, but I'm still seeing MWI as mostly just a conceptually simpler interpretation of accepted physics.