Whenever I see a high quality comment made by a deleted account (see for example this thread where the two main participants are both deleted accounts), I'd want to look over their comment history to see if I can figure out what sequence of events alienated them and drove them away from LW, but unfortunately the site doesn't allow that. Here SamLL provided one data point, for which I think we should be thankful, but keep in mind that many more people have left and not left visible evidence of the reason.

Also, aside from the specific reasons for each person leaving, I think there is a more general problem: why do perfectly reasonable people see a need to not just leave LW, but to actively disidentify or disaffiliate with LW, either through an explicit statement (SamLL's "still less am I enthused about identifying myself as part of a community where that's so widespread"), or by deleting their account? Why are we causing them to think of LW in terms of identity in the first place, instead of, say, a place to learn about and discuss some interesting ideas?

I always was rather curious about that other story EY mentions in the comments. (The "gloves off on the application of FT" one, not the boreanas one.) It could have made for tremendously useful memetic material / motivation for those who can't visualize a compelling future. Given all the writing effort he would later invest in MoR, I suppose the flaw with that prospect was a perceived forced tradeoff between motivating the unmotivated and demotivating the motivated.

What's even more interesting is that if this idea has any actual basis in reality... then it offers the possibility of coming up with approaches to counter it: promoting the idea that waking up from cryo will involve being enmeshed in a community rightaway.

Do we expect that to really be the case, though?

This may be somewhat besides the point of the OP, but "cryonics" + "social obligations" in the context of the old headache about the popularity of cryonics reminded me of this:

The laws of different countries allow potential donors to permit or refuse donation, or give this choice to relatives. The frequency of donations varies among countries.

There are two main methods for determining voluntary consent: "opt in" (only those who have given explicit consent are donors) and "opt out" (anyone who has not refused is a donor). Opt-out legislative systems dramatically increase effective rates of consent for donation.[1] For example, Germany, which uses an opt-in system, has an organ donation consent rate of 12% among its population, while Austria, a country with a very similar culture and economic development, but which uses an opt-out system, has a consent rate of 99.98%.[1][2]

~ Wikipedia on organ donation

So, The Tech is reporting that Aaron Swartz has killed himself. No suicide note has surfaced, PGP-signed or otherwise. No public statements that I've been able to find have identified witnesses or method. Aaron Swartz was known for having many enemies. There's the obvious enemies in the publishing industry and the US attorneys office. Cory Doctorow wrote that he had "a really unfortunate pattern of making high-profile, public denunciations of his friends and mentors."

I'd like to raise the possibility that this was not a natural event. Most of this evidence can be adequately explained by how little time has passed, so we'll know more in a few days or weeks.

Strange side note: He had a PGP public key on his web page at http://www.aaronsw.com/pgp, retrievable from Wayback Machine, but the link went bad some time after Jul 28 2012. All other links on the site seem to be fine.

Additional side note: if your chance of being murdered ever goes past 0.01, state publicly that you don't believe in suicide and that any suicide note would definitely be cryptographically verifiable. If it ever goes past 0.05, set up a record-audio-to-Internet button that you can activate in under a second, then give your lawyer a signed message saying that any supposed suicide note which lacks a certain phrase is fake.

Immortalism (probably what you meant by "transhumanist") is the norm here. I'm not sure what the normative response to your query is, though; my response would be "try to persuade them otherwise, forcibly restrain them until you succeed in doing so."

On the occasions I've had this conversation, IIRC, I don't seem to have managed to even get to the stage of them understanding that I /can/ care about what happens after I die, let alone get to an agreement about what's /worth/ caring about post-mortem.

This may seem like nitpicking, but I promise it's for non-troll purposes.

In short, I don't understand what the problem is. What do you mean by falling flat? That they don't understand what you're saying, that they don't agree with you, or something else? Are you trying to change their minds so that they'd think less about themselves and more about the civilization at large? What precisely is the goal that you're failing to accomplish?

I just said. "You have to mean it", so it's odd that you could kill someone you didn't mean to. Even if you interpret it as "You have to want someone dead, not necessarily the same person", "if you're arrested for killing with it, there's no possible defense", and "I meant to kill the Death Eater, but I hit the bystander" is a possible defense. Also nobody ever mentioned collateral damage.