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LucasSloan comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 27, chapter 98 - Less Wrong
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Does your theory have anything more to say than "the internet has changed things" to explain why I knew about cryonics at Harry's age?
...not especially? I heard about when I read "Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition", memory says at age 11 but the book's publication date might imply I should have been 12. "The Internet has changed things" - yes it did.
Harry is very, very likely to have come across the concept of cold sleep. That is not cryonics. Cryonics is the idea of freezing the dead in the hope of fixing the problem later with better tech, even if you do not even know how to revive the frozen at the time. As a serious idea, it is new and fringy, as fiction.. It does come up, but not very often - even people wishing to throw a character into the future usually handwave a stasis field.
Sure. That still doesn't answer the question of who does hear about it. We could just say that 1% of people who read SF have heard about it, but then my experience is hard to explain - I hadn't read all that much SF by age 11. It seems quite reasonable to say that the 10 years that the Internet existed between me and Harry was decisive, but I'm asking what variables explain the difference between two SF readers, only one of whom has heard of cryonics.
Uhm - an personal experience like this holds approximately zero data about its own frequency. The sheer number of things you encounter and learn about while growing up, and the universe of learning are both so vast that if your exploration of the library strays from the beaten path of school assignments, bestsellers and nigh-compulsory classics at all, you will learn many, many things which only small minorities have also encountered.
Well, how did you hear about it? I didn't (or didn't see it as a real possibility) until I read a mostly non-fiction book by Robert Anton Wilson, long after the age of 11.
I can't recall at this distance.