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ciphergoth comments on Looking for opinions of people like Nick Bostrom or Anders Sandberg on current cryo techniques - Less Wrong
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Paul Crowley here.
I am signed up for cryonics and I'd encourage others to do likewise. My comments on Twitter were meant as a caution against a naïve version of the expert opinion principal. As you can see, I've worked very hard to find out whether expert dismissal of cryonics is on expert grounds, or on ill thought out "silliness" grounds combined with a lingering supernatural idea of death. The evidence I currently have points overwhelming at the latter. To me this poses a problem not for cryonics but for how to make the best use of expert opinion.
Assuming a good future, I'd put the chances of revival through scanning and emulation at over 50%. For the cryonics process to do so much damage that there's no way for us to infer the lost information given full-blown neural archaeology, Nature would have to surprise us.
I'm curious to know what you think a "naive" version of the expert opinion principle is, and what a less-naive one would be.
After thinking about this beyond my comments on Twitter, one issue is that judgments about cryonics aren't just judgments about cryonics - they're about future technology that could be used to revive / upload cryopreserved people. I think I'd expect biologists (esp. neuroscientists and cryobiologists) to be trustworthy on current preservation techniques, but few will have anything approaching expertise about future technology.
I don't know. I'm more confident that the expert dismissal of cryonics is not founded in expertise than I am of any particular strategy on when to defer to expert belief. so I'd use cryonics to measure the strategy rather than vice versa.
By and large cryonics critics don't make clear exactly what part of the cryonics argument they mean to target, so it's hard to say exactly whether it covers an area of their expertise, but it's at least plausible to read them as asserting that cryopreserved people are information-theoretically dead, which is not guesswork about future technology and would fall under their area of expertise.