I just donated $5,000 to your fund at the Society of Venturism, as promised.

Like Stephan, I really hope you make your goal.

This concerns me (via STL):

IRS.gov: Automatic Revocation of Exemption Information

The federal tax exemption of this organization was automatically revoked for its failure to file a Form 990-series return or notice for three consecutive years. The information listed below for each organization is historical; it is current as of the organization's effective date of automatic revocation. The information is not necessarily current as of today's date. Nor does this automatic revocation necessarily reflect the organization's tax-exempt or non-exempt status. The organization may have applied to the IRS for recognition of exemption and been recognized by the IRS as tax-exempt after its effective date of automatic revocation. To check whether an organization is currently recognized by the IRS as tax-exempt, call Customer Account Services at (877) 829-5500 (toll-free number).

Why did you have to? Do you feel like the strength of your arguments alone wouldn't suffice?

That's exactly it. This page is stuffed with identity politics, prewritten bottom lines, base-rate neglect, likely sexism, sheer abandonment of optimal charity, scope insensitivity, equivocation & abuse of fuzzies vs utilons, and so on.

This is all LW orthodoxy to the extent there is such a thing, yet even so, the pull of 'dying cute girl wants cryonics! MUST HELP!' is so strong that LW orthodoxy + good rhetoric* still earns me a mix of heavy down and upvotes with the flow of donations apparently unabated.

* I don't think I'm very good at rhetoric, but I'll take your word for it.

And how many JGWs are there in the world?

I intend to sign up for cryonics in the next few years

Why not sign up now? To get started, just fill out this form and Rudi Hoffman will find insurance policies for you and walk you through the rest of the process. (You have clearly put some research into this, so if you have some other path, take it, but "the next few years" is too vague of a time frame for you to ever decide "now is the time to do it".)

Hey guys, you may know me as pizzarules1000, but I want to formally introduce myself to the community. My name is Kim Suozzi. Here's a link to my Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/kimsuozzi), a video I made today (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW3peOK1X9E), and Twitter, which you might enjoy (https://twitter.com/dblchb). I'd be happy to upload some documents confirming my identity/that I have cancer. I'll be at Duke tomorrow and can have my medical records sent to whomever. I also could upload a pathology report today, or have one of my doctors email you guys a document confirming my condition/treatment. I always have my driver license to show you as well. I just made a payment to CI (http://imgur.com/VVdoU) and asked them if they could help with handling the fund. I don't blame you for wanting to be careful.

Anyway, now that I have all of that out of the way (sort of), I want to express how deeply I appreciate everyone's support so far in donating, spreading my story, and otherwise advocating for me. I'm so glad that there's this robust community of intelligent and compassionate people that have come to my aid. As much as it sucks to die now, I'm goddamned lucky to live in the place and time that I do. You guys are giving me hope that I can achieve my goal. Again, it's hard to describe how much that means to me; people like you are offering me the most peace that can feasibly be found with knowledge that I'm going to die.

Not going to donate myself (makes no sense unless I set up my own cryo plans first), but I'll be quite happy for you if you reach your goal of $35k or so charged by CI. Good luck!

Great textbook example of the biases affecting charitable giving, isn't it? People will give more to a single, identifiable person than to an anonymous person or a group. People want to feel like they actually changed something they can directly see, rather than contributing a small amount to a big goal; etc.

I'll try again: your original cite said the cancer benefit was detectable at 5 years, and later. I've presented you with a 4 times larger study, in the relevant subpopulation, at 6 years which found no cancer benefit - and you are still asking rhetorical questions and coming up with excuses.

Do you think that if you had seen the evidence the other way around that you would be asking the same questions?

The meta-analysis you cite is moderately convincing, but only moderately. They had enough different analyses such that some would come out significant by pure chance. Aspirin was found to have an effect on 15-year-mortality significant only at the .05 level, and aspirin was found not to have a significant effect 20-year-mortality, so take it with a grain of salt. There was also some discussion in the literature about how it's meta-analyzing studies performed on people with cardiac risk factors but not bleed risk factors, and so the subjects may have been better candidates for aspirin than the general population.

The Wikipedia quote you give is referring to secondary prevention, which means "prevention of a disease happening again in someone who's already had the disease". Everyone agrees aspirin is useful for secondary prevention, but there are a lot of cases where something useful for secondary prevention isn't as good for primary. In primary prevention, aspirin doesn't get anywhere near a tenth reduction in mortality (although it does seem to have a lesser effect).

I would say right now there's enough evidence that people who enjoy self-experimentation are justified in trying low-dose aspirin and probably won't actively hurt themselves (assuming they check whether they're at special risk of bleeds first), but not enough evidence that doctors should be demonized for not telling everyone to do it.