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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 2 - Less Wrong
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This is factually false. I suspect if you looked through the last 1000 Articles or Discussion posts, you'd find <5% on life extension (including cryonics) and surely <10%.
Cryonics does not even command much support; in the last LW survey, 'probability cryonics will work' averaged 21%; 4% of LWers were signed up, 36% opposed, and 54% merely 'considering' it. So if you posted something criticizing cryonics (which a number of my posts could be construed as...), you would be either supported or regarded indifferently by ~90% of LW.
As I wrote in a comment to the survey results post, the interpretation of assignment of low probability to cryonics as some sort of disagreement or opposition is misleading:
Of course not. Why the low probability is important is because it defeats the simplistic non-probabilistic usual accounts of cultists as believing in dogmatic shibboleths; if Bart119 were sophisticated enough to say that 10% is still too much, then we can move the discussion to a higher plane of disagreement than simply claiming 'LW seems obsessed with cryonics', hopefully good arguments like '$250k is too much to pay for such a risky shot at future life' or 'organizational mortality implies <1% chance of cryopreservation over centuries and the LW average is shockingly optimistic' etc.
To continue your existential risk analogy, this is like introducing someone to existential risks and saying it's really important stuff, and then them saying 'but all those risks have never happened to us!' This person clearly hasn't grasped the basic cost-benefit claim, so you need to start at the beginning in a way you would not with someone who immediately grasps it and makes a sophisticated counter-claim like 'anthropic arguments show that existential risks have been overestimated'.