You can freeze nematodes and water bears fairly easily. Notably both of these are evolved to survive dessication and freezing in their normal life cycle and have their largest dimension on the order of one mm. Its a bit of a stretch to call what some frogs can do naturally in the outdoors 'freezing' but again, massive evolutionary pressure.

If you try to freeze a complicated structure bigger than a few cubic centimeters that isn't the ridiculously vascularized and quite small and very homogenous in terms of water content rabbit kidney, you come up with something that is so damaged by the freezing process that it falls apart physically and chemically upon unfreezing. The unfreezing part is not the limiting factor, because there just isn't a paused functional organism left behind by the freezing process.

Alex is an expert on his own life

The OP is an expert on the facts of his own life. One of the standard LW lessons is that people tend to suck at evaluating themselves, though.

Moving to a big city should also help. Currently I am living in a relatively thinly populated region of a bit less than a million people. Is there material on this, that is choosing the right city for onself? It gets ridiculous how fast choices shrink the more constraints one sets.

Yes, though it seems harder to tell whether one can get into such a position ahead of time, with less transparency.

It's easy to tell ahead of time that you can make an impact as a blogger or a startup founder or a non-profit leader? Hardly - those are all high-risk endeavors, especially in the digital domain: many smart bloggers with something great to say never reach a large audience; many even fail to a modest but interested audience.

Stability and consistency are the rewards of traditional, ordinary careers; and for many people those are excellent virtues. Make sure your clients understand this. Entrepreneurship, in particular, requires a certain degree of hubris. Society as a whole gains from that hubris, and in selected sectors and times and places the would-be entrepreneurs gain in expectation, but "How would I handle failure" should be a question that anyone embarking on such a path should sincerely ask themselves first".

What are some other categories? (I can think of others, like tech entrepreneurship, but I'm wondering if there are ones that haven't occurred to me.

Non-tech entrepreneurship. And in the domain of non-profits, locally-oriented ones. They can't impact as many people, but impact is often greater and more immediate, and your impact is more immediately visible to yourself. For some people being able to closely observe their own impact is very motivating.

In general, however, at a young age foundational skills and opening their minds are more important than any particular direction (though a particular cause/direction can be very motivating). Show people who think academics or hard sciences are the obvious path that all sorts of "soft skills" are actually very valuable even in their presumptive careers, but can also open their eyes to other paths.

Whatever they seem to have closed their mind to without proper consideration, that's what you can target for each individual.

Thanks for the thoughts!

I'm curious - what do you think of UnCollege and how it manages to advertise/fund itself? Would you be interested in following a similar model?

I've visited UnCollege once. The participants there seemed very curious and open to experience. I don't know enough about the program itself to make an assessment, though my superficial impressions were favorable. I tend to think that going to college is a good idea for almost everyone who's capable of doing well there, and to that extent there's tension between my views and theirs, but in many cases the participants seemed to be delaying college by a single year rather than not attending altogether.

I don't know what their funding model is – do you? I assumed that the participants pay.

Also - what about advertising on sites like College Confidential and reddit? It probably wouldn't run well with the mods there if you advertised too much, but doing it once might work.

Yeah, I've been hesitant to post to College Confidential because of their strict no-advertising policy. I made a few of our posts to Reddit, but didn't get any upvotes.

I think getting in touch with the homeschooling community might also provide some ideas. People in those communities can be incredibly motivated and resourceful.

We've done some of this (e.g. Gifted Homeschoolers Forum links an article that I wrote about college admissions for home schoolers, but we can probably do more. Thanks.

It's also important to note that K-12 education tends to infantilize people in general (and restrain their imagination of what's possible and what isn't). Many (though not all) 16-18 year old homeschooled students can have incredible levels of maturity and self-awareness.

I'm curious: what sorts of communities are they most familiar with? What did they think of College Confidential? And what were the subreddits that they were most familiar with?

We've struggled to find avenues by which to disseminate our advice. There seem to be few forums where smart high school students congregate. Those forums and mailing lists that do exist often have strict guidelines against posters promoting their own blogs. We're grateful that Less Wrong has been welcoming.

I think you are likely making a strategic mistake by focusing on outreach instead of focusing on building a place where people want to go.

A wordpress page that doesn't have an RSS feed but points me to a list of blog post written on another forum and a link to a Quora blog doesn't give the impression of a highly reputable venue.

You wrote a bunch of high value post but didn't published them on your own website but on Lesswrong and Quora. That's nice for Lesswrong but doesn't provide you yourself with a website that get's good traffic from google.

Given that you already have a strategy of writing high value posts have you thought about asking a place like Business Insider or Forbes whether they would pay you to write posts on a blog on their platform?

At this point, we're seeking philanthropic funding, and would appreciate any ideas as to how to secure it.

In the effective altruistic community there are people thinking about spending money where it has the highest impact, what's your exact case, that they should give you that money instead of giving it to malaria prevention?

When it comes to having a public reputation I would also recommend to give speeches. There might be plenty of venues in San Francisco that like quality speeches on education. It might be a better way to build relationships with people who are willing to give you money than seeking money online, where you don't meet the people who make the decisions face to face.

I'm curious - what do you think of UnCollege and how it manages to advertise/fund itself? Would you be interested in following a similar model?

Also - what about advertising on sites like College Confidential and reddit? It probably wouldn't run well with the mods there if you advertised too much, but doing it once might work.

I think getting in touch with the homeschooling community might also provide some ideas. People in those communities can be incredibly motivated and resourceful.

I almost never found it cliquish, which is different from what I've heard of other elite schools. People are either notably shy or willing to talk to anyone, anytime, about their favorite intellectual topics. (I guess what I'm saying is that the UChicago autism bell curve is a few standard deviations to the right of the usual one...)