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Lumifer comments on Open thread, Sep. 14 - Sep. 20, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I don't think the average matters, it's the right tail of the distribution that's important.
Take, say, people with 130+ IQ -- that's about 2.5% of your standard white population and the overwhelming majority of them are not signed up. In fact, in any IQ quantile only a miniscule fraction has signed up.
entirelyuseless made the point that low cryonics use rates in the general population are evidence against the effectiveness of cryonics. James Miller responded by citing evidence supporting cryonics: that cryonicists are disproportionately intelligent/capable/well-informed. If your response to James is just that very few people have signed up for cryonics, then that's restating entirelyuseless' point. "The intellectual quality of some people who have NOT signed up for cryonics is exceptionally high" would be true even in a world where every cryonicist were more intelligent than every non-cryonicist, just given how few cryonicists there are.
No, I don't think he did. The claim that low uptake rate is evidence against the effectiveness of cryonics is nonsense on stilts. entirelyuseless' point was that if you are in a tiny minority and you don't understand why the great majority doesn't join you, your understanding of the situation is... limited.
James Miller countered by implying that this problem can be solved if one assumes that it's the elite (IQ giants, possessors of secret gnostic knowledge, etc.) which signs up for cryonics and the vast majority of the population is just too stupid to take a great deal when it sees it.
My counter-counter was that you can pick any measure by which to choose your elite (e.g. IQ) and still find that only a miniscule fraction of that elite chose cryonics -- which means that the "just ignore the stupid and look at the smart ones" argument does not work.