What about the brain damage her tumor is causing?

Jim Glennie (A-1367) had a glioblastoma multiforme, and cryoprotective perfusion achieved the best Glycerol concentration at the time (6.02M glycerol, 1992). A-2091 (name withheld) also had a glioblastoma and reportedly "target cryoprotectant concentration was reached in the brain".

Thomas Donaldson (A-1097) had an astrocytoma (I guess Astrocytes are a kind of glial cell, but I doubt the comparison can be extended further) and his cryopreservation was very good [p.16].

I am far from an expert and simply would like to hear some authoritative commentary on this

Disclaimer: I am not medically trained.

EDIT: I'm not sure if you're referring to brain damage affecting cryoprotection or brain damage affecting her mental state and making her opt out.

What about the brain damage her tumor is causing?

This seems important and I'm a little surprised no one's asked. How will her brain damage impact her chances of revival? (From the blog linked in the reddit post, it sounds like she is already experiencing symptoms.) Obviously she is quite mentally competent right now, but what about when she is declared legally dead? I am far from an expert and simply would like to hear some authoritative commentary on this. I am interested in donating but only if there's a reasonable chance brain damage won't make it superfluous.

This is a really good exposition of the two envelopes problem. I recall reading a lot about that when I first heard it, and didn't feel that anything I read satisfactorily resolved it, which this does. I particularly liked the more precise recasting of the problem at the beginning.

(It sounds like some credit is also due to VincentYu.)

Nobody has come up with any system of punishment that provably provides deterrence or rehabilitation. When someone does, there will be some point in complaining the existing alternative doesn't. A criterion all alternatives fail is not a basis for a decision.

How about security? Well, yes, prison isn't particularly necessary for rendering corporate fraudsters not a threat, but, how much of the prison population is such? For the ordinary run of thieves and violent criminals, prison does prevent further predation on the populace for the duration of their stays. But would we be safe if they went free? The author claimed only a "small minority" of prisoners are habitual dangers. Well, the rate at which prisoners released in 1994 were re-arrested for a felony or serious misdemeanor within 3 years was 67.5%, and the re-conviction rate was 46.9%. That doesn't seem like a "small minority" to me. USDOJ Recidivism of Prisoners Released study

The author mentions that if security were the goal, "people found guilty of attempted murder would go to prison for as long as murderers." Well? The Model Penal Code, in fact, does provide the same punishment for both attempted and successful crimes down the whole list. This is not consistently implemented by the states, but it is a standard that most codifications have been moved toward in the last 50 years.

And when we get to his claim that imprisonment is more severe a punishment than execution, well, certainly the people facing execution seem to fairly consistently prefer extending their prison stays to death. That would seem to be a better indication of the severity from the convict's perspective than the author's imagination.

I had long ago (but after being heavily influenced by Overcoming Bias) thought that signaling could be seen simply as a corollary to Bayes' theorem. That is, when one says something, one knows that its effect on a listener will depend on the listener's rational updating on the fact that one said it. If one wants the listener to behave as if X is true, one should say something that the listener would only expect in case X is true.

Thinking in this way, one quickly arrives at conclusions like "oh, so hard-to-fake signals are stronger" and "if everyone starts sending the same signal in the same way, that makes it a lot weaker", which test quite well against observations of the real world.

Powerful corollary: we should expect signaling, along with these basic properties, to be prominent in any group of intelligent minds. For example, math departments and alien civilizations. (Non-example: solitary AI foom.)

I'm really glad you pointed out that SI's strategy is not predicated on hard take-off. I don't recall if this has been discussed elsewhere, but that's something that always bothered me since I think hard take-off is relatively unlikely. (Admittedly, soft take-off still considerably diminishes my expected impact for SI and donating to it.)

But this elegant simplicity was, like so many other things, ruined by the Machiguenga Indians of eastern Peru.

Wait, is this a joke, or have the Machiguenga really provided counterexamples to lots of social science hypotheses?

It's strange that we have many phrases like "on the one/other hand", "pros and cons", and "both sides of the story", then.

I have direct experience of someone highly intelligent, a prestigious academic type, dismissing SI out of hand because of its name. I would support changing the name.

Almost all the suggestions so far attempt to reflect the idea of safety or friendliness into the name. I think this might be a mistake, because for people who haven't thought about it much, this invokes images of Hollywood. Instead, I propose having the name imply that SI does some kind of advanced, technical research involving AI and is prestigious, perhaps affiliated with a university (think IAS).

Center for Advanced AI Research (CAAIR)

I don't think you're addressing the subject of this thread, which is "does there exist a strong technical argument against cryonics that a lot of people already know".