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V_V comments on Looking for opinions of people like Nick Bostrom or Anders Sandberg on current cryo techniques - Less Wrong
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Why did you find the analogy convincing? It doesn't look like a good analogy:
It's cherry picked: erasing information from hard drives is hard, because they are very stable information storage devices. A powered down hard drive can retain its content for at least decades, probably centuries if the environmental conditions are good. Consider a modern DRAM chip instead: power it down and its content will disappear within seconds. Retention time can be increased to days or perhaps weeks by cooling to cryogenic temperatures before power down, and after the data has become unreadable by normal means, specialized probes and microscopy techniques could in some cases still retrieve it for some time, but ultimately the data will fade. It's unlikely than any future technology will be ever able to recover data from a RAM chip that has been powered down for months, even if cryogenically stored. Of course brains are neither RAM chips nor hard drives, but the point is that having high data remanence is specific to certain technologies and not some general property of all practical information storage systems.
It suggests an Argument from Ignorance: "Pumping someone full of cryoprotectant and gradually lowering their temperature until they can be stored in liquid nitrogen is not a secure way to erase a person." The implicit argument here is that since you can't be sure that cryopreservation destroys a person, you should infer that it doesn't. That's obviously a fallacy.
Furthermore the referenced post introduces spurious motives (signalling) for signing up for cryonics, committing the fallacy of Social Conformance: "Not signing up for cryonics - what does that say? That you've lost hope in the future. That you've lost your will to live. That you've stopped believing that human life, and your own life, is something of value."
Why do you particularly care about their opinion? They are not domain experts, and being futurists/transhumanists there is a non-negligible chance that their opinion on the subject is biased.
There's another problem with the hard drive analogy - he's comparing the goal of completely erasing a hard drive to erasing just enough of a person for them to not be the "same" person anymore.
With the kind of hardcare hard drive erasing he talks about, the goal is to make sure that not one bit is recoverable. If the attacker can determine that there may have been a jpeg somewhere at sometime, or what kind of filesystem you were using, they win.
The analogous win in cryonics would be for future archeologists to recover any information about who you were as a person, which orders of magnitude easier than doing a near-complete reconstruction of the algorithm-that-is-you.
Where, exactly, in the brain that information is stored is all too relevant a question. For all we know it could be more feasible to scrape identity from IRC logs and email history. I would not personally be upset if I no longer had a favorite flavor of ice cream, for example.
I agree with this objection to the hard-drive analogy. Some of the pro-cryonics arguments like the examples of wood frogs, & human drowning victims/coma/flatliners as well as what is currently believed about how memory is stored go some way to showing that memory & personality are closer to hard drives than RAM, but are far from conclusive. I've suggested in the past that would close down this objection would be training some small creature which can be vitrified & revived successfully, and verifying that its memories are still there, but as far as I know, this has never been done.
Actually no, modern DRAM loses information in milliseconds, even assuming you could cool it down to liquid helium temperatures. After a few seconds the data is almost entirely random.
Here's a citation for the claim of DRAM persisting with >99% accuracy for seconds at operating temperature or hours at LN2. (The latest hardware tested there is from 2007. Did something drastically change in the last 6 years?)
Yup, the introduction of DDR3 memory. See http://www1.cs.fau.de/filepool/projects/coldboot/fares_coldboot.pdf