Intelligent people are more likely to think on the consequences when deciding to have a child. But there is a prisoner's dilemma type of situation here:

One reason smart people forego reproduction is because they might feel children make them more unhappy overall for at least the first few years (a not unreasonable assumption). Or simply because they are not religious (smart religious people do still have lots of children) As a consequence, in 20 years, the average IQ of that society will fall (bar some policy reversals encouraging eugenic breeding, or advances in genetic engineering), as only the less intelligent breed. Since, all other things equal, smarter people perform better on their jobs, the average quality of services provided in that society (both public and private) goes down. So in the end everyone becomes more unhappy (even though unhappiness of a childless smart person resulting from societal dysgenics may not outweigh the temporary unhappiness from having a child)

Re: talking about problems in the biochemistry field in general:

I'm sure that there are lots of problems, and I don't mean to invalidate anyone's points, but on the bright side, genetic sequencing has been getting faster and cheaper FASTER than moore's law predicts. http://www.forbes.com/sites/techonomy/2012/01/12/dna-sequencing-is-now-improving-faster-than-moores-law/

We're ALMOST to the point where we do full-genome sequencing on a tumor biopsy to adjust a patient's chemo drugs. The results unfortunately haven't been reproducible yet, so it's not quite ready for clinical practice, but by golly we're close. It currently costs about $4,000 per genome, and we're less than 10 years after the Human Genome Project which was 13 years and 3 billion dollars for a single genome. One company claims its soon-to-be-released machine will do it in 4-5 days for $900.

Pretty much everything I have to say is in EDIT http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition

But not everything is the way it was. Before he made any wishes, he had three.

She missed the chance to trap him in an infinite loop.

Probably true at a lot of universities, although it might still be true that you'll have a better hit rate at university than at most other places.

Some universally important skills that I wish I had been a lot better at in college:

• Networking and selling yourself. None of the other (professional) skills you develop will matter if you can't get a job where you use them.
• How to collaborate effectively.
• Setting priorities and time management.

Beyond that, it's very important to know what your goals/values are. What do you want to get out of an ideal career? Why are you majoring in physics? It's hard to optimize before you know what you're optimizing for.

For most people, college is the last chance you have to interact with smart, ambitious people in fields outside your own. You should take advantage of that diversity while you can, as it will pay off both in rewarding friendships and intellectual stimulation down the line.

I'm wondering if there is any selfish reason to want procryostinators to sign up, other than hoping that more participants would improve the odds of your favorite cryo outfit surviving until the time revival becomes feasible, or that more research would go into it?

If anyone else dislikes Rudi the way I do (and doesn't need his help to get signed up at all), my life insurance company is pretty okay; they're called New York Life. I picked them off a list of cryo-friendly insurance companies Alcor provided in an info packet (even though I went with CI) and they have been very responsive and are willing to conduct all relevant business without the use of telephones (which criterion is part of how I narrowed down said list).

The study you quoted only seems to address if signing helped the child learn spoken word labels about certain toys.

The (possible) benefit of signing is that the child can communicate with you about whether they are hungry, thirsty, cold, hot, have a wet diaper, etc.--not about whether the child can name different toys. The study doesn't address whether or not sign language reduces frusteration in children or whether children can learn signs for how they feel faster or slower than they can learn the same spoken words.