Comment author: Clarity 27 December 2015 01:24:40PM 0 points [-]

I sign up for cryonics, but I live in Australia or I'm travelling outside of the US and don't manage to transport my body to the US in a reasonable amount of time.

Comment author: Academian 31 December 2015 10:36:14PM 0 points [-]

This is a cryonics-fails story, not a cryonics-works-and-is-bad story.

Comment author: SatvikBeri 23 December 2015 10:19:22PM 2 points [-]

The process of revival is imperfect, and pieces of memories are frequently missing. None of your loved ones remember you, and some of them are in permanent Alzheimers-like states. One person claims to have been close to pre-revival you, but you don't remember them. Having felt the pain of being rejected by your closest friend, you decide to trust them. That turns out to be an elaborate scam, possibly motivated by pure sadism, and you're now alone in a world you don't recognize and where you have to be suspicious of everyone you meet.

Comment author: Academian 31 December 2015 10:32:16PM 0 points [-]

Seems not much worse than actual-death, given that in this scenario you could still choose to actually-die if you didn't like your post-cryonics life.

Comment author: devas 23 December 2015 01:15:37PM 6 points [-]

You are one of the first to be revived.

The technique is imperfect, and causes you massive neurological damage (think late stage Alzheimer's), trapping you in a nonverbal yet incredibly painful and horrifying state.

Due to advances in gerontology, you have a nearly infinite lifespan ahead of you, cognizant only of what you have lost.

When neuroscience finally advances to the point where you can be fixed, it's still not yet advanced enough to give you back your memories.

You're effectively a completely different person, and you know that.

Comment author: Academian 31 December 2015 10:31:22PM 0 points [-]

Seems not much worse than actual-death, given that in this scenario you (or the person who replaces you) could still choose to actually-die if you didn't like your post-cryonics life.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 24 December 2015 12:36:53PM *  3 points [-]

I've seen people consider the Warren Ellis take plausible. Excerpt:

Looking at her new charity-donated clothes, still bearing the ammonia spoor of the man who wore them last, Mary's shocked brain started to a new understanding.

She wasn't wanted here.

She was Revived out of a sense of begrudged duty. She'd been foisted upon a future already busy enough with its own problems by a past that couldn't have cared less.

She could have told the future what it'd been like to meet Che Guevara in that old Cuban schoolhouse. She could've told them about the last Queen and Albert Einstein and a million other true stories besides.

But the future didn't want to know. It honored the contracts with the past; revived them, gave them their money back (even adjusted the sum in their favor against revaluation and inflation), gave them the Hostels.

Put them away with a new, unspoken contract: Don't bother us. We're not interested.

Comment author: Academian 31 December 2015 10:29:15PM 0 points [-]

Seems not much worse than actual-death, given that in this scenario you could still choose to actually-die if you didn't like your post-cryonics life.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 23 December 2015 02:08:30PM 0 points [-]

The technology would work, but an existential threat wipes out humanity while you are asleep.

Comment author: Academian 23 December 2015 06:55:25PM *  0 points [-]

This is an example where cryonics fails, and so not the kind of example I'm looking for in this thread. Sorry if that wasn't clear from the OP! I'm leaving this comment to hopefully prevent more such examples from distracting potential posters.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 23 December 2015 11:58:50AM *  -1 points [-]

Preservation and revival is possible, but not for the current technology of preservation. Everyone in Alcor's tanks right now is irretrievably dead. The gamble was worth making at the time, but it didn't pay off.

The bodies may be useful for their genetic information, especially from their gut biota.

I remember a poem that appeared in one of the science fiction magazines a long time ago, the gist of which was:

"Here are some diseases you may have forgotten about. I'm sorry I had nothing to wrap them in but the body of this old man. Yours, DEATH."

Comment author: Academian 23 December 2015 06:51:38PM 0 points [-]

Hmm, this seems like it's not a cryonics-works-for-you scenario, and I did mean to exclude this type of example, though maybe not super clearly:

OP: There's a separate question of whether the outcome is positive enough to be worth the money, which I'd rather discuss in a different thread.

Comment author: Academian 23 December 2015 07:38:46AM 4 points [-]

(2) A rich sadist finds it somehow legally or logistically easier to lay hands on the brains/minds of cryonics patients than of living people, and runs some virtual torture scenarios on me where I'm not allowed to die for thousands of subjective years or more.

Comment author: Academian 23 December 2015 07:38:22AM 5 points [-]

(1) A well-meaning but slightly-too-obsessed cryonics scientist wakes up some semblance of me in a semi-conscious virtual delirium for something like 1000 very unpleasant subjective years of tinkering to try recovering me. She eventually quits, and I never wake up again.

Survey: What's the most negative*plausible cryonics-works story that you know?

5 Academian 23 December 2015 07:32AM

Warning: people will be trying to be pessimistic here.  Don't read this if you don't want to be reminded of scary outcomes.

Request: if you get an idea that you think might be too scary to post publicly even under the above warning, but you are willing to send it to me in a private message to aid in my personal decision-making, then please do :)

Motivation:

I like cryonics.  According to my parents and grandmother, I started talking about building an AI to help with medical research to revive frozen dead people when I was about 10 years old, and my memory agrees.  I began experimenting with freeing and unfreezing insects, and figured based on some positive results that it was physically possible to preserve life in a frozen state.  Cool!

But now that I'm in middle of convincing some folks I know to sign up for cryonics, I want to do due-diligence on some of the vague, hard-to-verbalize aversions they have to doing it.  This way, I can help them plan contingencies for / hedges against those aversions if possible, thereby making cryonics more viable for them, and maybe avoid accidentally persuading people do cryonics when it really isn't right for them (yes, I think that can actually happen).

There's already been a post on far negative outcomes, and another one on why cryonics maybe isn't worth it.  But what I really want to do here is conduct an interactive survey to compute which disutilities should be taken most seriously when talking to a new person about cryonics, to avoid accidentally persuading them into making a wrong-for-them decision.

And for that, what I really want to ask is:

 What's the most negative*plausible cryonics-works story that you know of?

Examples:

(1) A well-meaning but slightly-too-obsessed cryonics scientist wakes up some semblance of me in a semi-conscious virtual delirium for something like 1000 very unpleasant subjective years of tinkering to try recovering me.  She eventually quits, and I never wake up again.

(2) A rich sadist finds it somehow legally or logistically easier to lay hands on the brains/minds of cryonics patients than of living people, and runs some virtual torture scenarios on me where I'm not allowed to die for thousands of subjective years or more.

I think on reflection I'd consider (1) to be around 10x and maybe 100x more likely than (2)*, but depending on your preferences, you might find (2) to be more than 100x worse than (1), enough to make it account for the biggest chunk of disutility that can be attributed to any particular simple story or story-feature where cryonics works.

[* I would have said (1) was definitely more than 100x more likely before so many of my female friends have, over the years, mentioned that they were subject to some pretty scary sexual violence at some point in their dating lives.]

(Note: There's a separate question of whether the outcome is positive enough to be worth the money, which I'd rather discuss in a different thread.)

How to participate: 

  • Top-level comments = stories.  Post your most negative*plausible story or story-feature as a top-level comment.
  • A top-level upvote shall mean "essentially in my top-three".   Upvote stories that you'd consider essentially the same as one of your top-two stories, ranked by negativity*probability.  This means you can vote more than three times if your top stories get represented in variety of ways, so don't be shy.
  • Lower-level comments = discussion!  Let's disagree about the relative probabilities and negativities of things and maybe change some of our minds!

Thanks for playing :)

PS I hope folks use these ideas to come up with ways to decrease the likelihood that cryonics leads to negative outcomes, and not to cause or experience premature fears that derail productive conversations.  So, please don't share/post this in ways where you think it might have the latter effect, but rather, use it as a part of a sane and thorough evaluation of all the pros and cons that one should reasonably consider in deciding whether cryonics working is on-net a positive outcome.

ETA -- What not to post:

Some non-examples of what this survey should contain...

 

  • Examples where you don't get revived in any way.  These scenarios factor into the "will cryonics work for me" question, a question of probability that does not depend on your values, which I'd prefer to discuss is a separate thread because probabilities are easier to converge on without distracting ourselves with values questions. 
Comment author: IlyaShpitser 20 December 2015 04:59:26PM 1 point [-]

Sure, but for example things used to market a charity and effectiveness of charity are distinct.

People worry about "effectiveness." Is that going out the window in this case?

Comment author: Academian 20 December 2015 11:05:06PM *  5 points [-]

See Nate's comment above:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/n39/why_cfar_the_view_from_2015/cz99

And, FWIW, I would also consider anything that spends less than $100k causing a small number of top-caliber researchers to become full-time AI safety researchers to be extremely "effective".

[This is in fact a surprisingly difficult problem to solve. Aside from personal experience seeing the difficulty of causing people to become safety researchers, I have also been told by some rich, successful AI companies earnestly trying to set up safety research divisions (yay!) that they are unable to hire appropriately skilled people to work full-time on safety.]

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