private_messaging comments on The Extended Living-Forever Strategy-Space - Less Wrong

10 Post author: Froolow 02 May 2014 02:15PM

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Comment author: private_messaging 07 May 2014 11:20:46AM *  0 points [-]

It seems to me that given all the causes of premature death (e.g. lifetime fatal cancer rate of 20%), cryonics and the other strategies of yours, taken together, are utterly insignificant in comparison with a healthy lifestyle that decreases the risk of premature death by even one percent.

Of course, some people assign very high probability to cryonics as is presently implemented. It may not be a harmless belief if there's risk compensation at play - it'd be interesting to correlate BMI with the estimated probability of cryonics working, among those trying to live forever.

With regards to the solution space for the problem of preserving information in the brain, it's as huge as all possible chemical preservative mixes, and it seems to me that somewhere within that space there's a solution along the lines of cutting the brain into small pieces and putting them into a jar of formaldehyde or a similar cross linking preservative. Very cheap and consequently of no interest to the sort of people who offer to "cryopreserve" bodies that have been stored in dry ice for 2 weeks.

And on a wider scale, there's young people dying of preventable causes right now, who can be saved by use of far less $ . So it's just not worth it to work on brain preservation for charitable reasons.