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jkaufman comments on Cryonics As Untested Medical Procedure - Less Wrong Discussion
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Why do you think "it is incredibly unlikely that it's destroying enough information to make it actually impossible to recover"? Where did you learn it? Did the "secure deletion" argument convince you of it or is it something you believed before?
The secure deletion argument convinced me, yes. It's a compelling analogy, in that it points out how difficult it is to actually destroy information, even in a minimally-redundant medium when you're specifically trying to destroy that information. A process in a brain, which is a highly-redundant medium, when specifically trying not to destroy data, is incredibly unlikely to make information unrecoverable.
Hard drives aren't minimally redundant. The size of the magnetic regions on the platter is bounded from below by the requirement that the heads must be able to read and write them while passing over them at a very high speed.
Furthermore, hard drives are a very stable medium: they are designed to reliably retain data for years or decades without power (possibly they may retain data even for centuries if the storage conditions are right).
I think it's a bad analogy, and a cherry picked one. Contrast with how easy it is to delete data from a DRAM chip, and you'll get why analogies with modern computer hardware don't really make any sense for biological brains.
Except that the analogy is wrong: it's quite easy to destroy the information. In practice, writing random data to a modern hard disk leaves it unrecoverable.
So:
Why did the idea that hard drives (a completely different form of data storage, something specifically designed to retain data across a wide range of conditions) are hard to erase make you think that it was hard to erase data from brains?
Now that you know that it isn't hard to irrecoverably erase hard drives (even though they're designed to retain data), how does that affect the analogy with brains? Why?