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jkaufman comments on I Will Pay $500 To Anyone Who Can Convince Me To Cancel My Cryonics Subscription - Less Wrong
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I'll bite. (I don't want the money. If I get it, I'll use it for what is considered by some on this site as ego-gratifying wastage for Give Directly or some similar charity.)
If you look around, you'll find "scientist"-signed letters supporting creationism. Philip Johnson, a Berkeley law professor is on that list, but you find a very low percertage of biologists. If you're using lawyers to sell science, you're doing badly. (I am a lawyer.)
The global warming issue has better lists of people signing off, including one genuinely credible human: Richard Lindzen of MIT. Lindzen, though, has oscillated from "manmade global warming is a myth," to a more measured view that the degree of manmade global warming is much, much lower than the general view. The list of signatories to a global warming skeptic letter contains some people with some qualifications on the matter, but many who do not seem to have expertise.
Cryonics? Well, there's this. Assuming they would put any neuroscience qualifications that the signatories had... this looks like the intelligent design letters. Electrical engineers, physicists... let's count the people with neuroscience expertise, other than people whose careers are in hawking cryonics:
Kenneth Hayworth, a post-doc now at Harvard.
Ravin Jain, Los Angeles neurologist. He was listed as an assistant professor of neurology at UCLA in 2004, but he's no longer employed by UCLA.
That's them. There are a number of other doctors on there; looking up the people who worked for cryonics orgs is fun. Many of them have interesting histories, and many have moved on. The letter is pretty lightweight; it just says there's a credible chance that they can put you back together again after the big freeze. I think computer scientists dominate the list. That is a completely terrible sign.
There are other conversations here and elsewhere about the state of the brain involving interplay between the neurons that's not replicable with just the physical brain. There's also the failure to resuscitate anyone from brain death. This provides additional evidence that this won't work.
Finally, the people running the cryonics outfits have not had the best record of honesty and stability. If Google ran a cryonics outfit, that would be more interesting, for sure. But I don't think that's going to happen; this is not the route to very long life.
[Edit 1/14 - fixed a miscapitalization and a terrible sentence construction. No substantive changes.]
This is a little unfair: if you have neuroscience experience and think cryonics is very important, then going to work for Alcor or CI may be where you can have the most impact. At which point others note that you're financially dependent on people signing up for cryonics and write you off as biased.
In a world where cryonics were obviously worthwhile to anyone with neuroscience expertise, one would expect to see many more cryonics-boosting neuroscientists than could be employed by Alcor and CI. Indeed, you might expect there to be more major cryonics orgs than just those two.
In other words, it's only unfair if we think size of the "neuroscientist" pool is roughly comparable to the size of the market for cryonics researchers. It's not, so IMO JRMayne raises an interesting point, and not one I'd considered before.