This is a fantastically burdensome explanation for why people don't sign up for cryonics. Do people who do sign up for cryonics usually have happier lives? (Not that I've heard of.) Do the same people who turn down cryonics turn down other forms of medical care? (Not that I've heard of.) If we found that people signing up for cryonics were less happy on average, would we be able to construct an equally plausible-sounding symmetrical argument that people with happy, fulfilled lives see no need for a second one? (Yes.)

I hate to go into psychologizing, but I suspect that Mike Darwin wants a grand narrative of Why, Oh Why Cryonics Fails, a grand narrative that makes sense of this shocking and incomprehensible fact and gives some info on what needs to be done to relieve the frustration.

The truth is that people aren't anything like coherent enough to refuse cryonics for a reason like that.

Asking them about cryonics gets their prerecorded verbal behaviors about "immortality" which bear no relation whatsoever to their feelings about whether or not life is fun.

Remember the fraction of people that take $500 for certain over a 15% chance of $1 million? How could you possibly need any elaborate explanation of why they don't sign up for cryonics? Risk-aversion, loss-aversion, ambiguity-aversion, status quo bias.

Cryonics sounds strange and not-of-our-tribe and they don't see other people doing it, a feeling expressed in words as "weird". It's perceptually categorized as similar to religions or other scams they've heard about from the newspaper, based purely on surface features and without any reference to, or remediability by, the strength of the underlying logic; that's never checked. Mike Darwin thinks that if you have better preservation techniques, people will sign up in droves, because right now they're hearing about cryonics and rejecting it because the preservation techniques aren't good enough. This is obviously merely false, and the sort of thing which makes me think that Mike Darwin needs a grand narrative which tells him what to do to solve the problem, the way that Aubrey de Grey thinks that good enough rejuvenation results in mice will grandly solve deathism.

I recently got a phone call saying that, if I recall correctly, around a quarter - or maybe it was half - of all Alcor's cryonics signups this year, are originating from LW/Yudkowsky/rationality readers. If you want people to sign up for cryonics, the method with by far the strongest conversion ratio is to train them from scratch in advanced sanity techniques. Nothing else that cryonics advocates have tried, including TV ads, has ever actually worked. There's no simple reason people don't sign up, no grand narrative, nothing that makes sense of cryonicists' frustration, people are just crazy in rather simple and standard ways. The only grand narrative for beating that is "soon, your annual signups will equal 10% of the people who've gone through a rationality bootcamp plus 1% of the people who've read both Eliezer's nonfiction book and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality."