On the plus side, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is the fourth response to Rationality, even signed out.

There's probably an absurdity bias going on in the rejection of cryonics (the dead just don't come back, and frozen people look dead). It also violates tradition (burying and incineration). And in our culture, the mere image of frozen bodies in a fridge has more disgusting connotations than happy ones.

So that's my speculation about why someone who never actually thought about cryonics might reject it. Maybe if we tell those people about these reasons, they could change their mind?

Then you may be interested in the research of Michael I. Jordan. (The computational biology link will probably be the most useful to you, but as you can see from the diversity of applications, he's quite the generalist.)

Out of professional curiosity, what is the focus of your research? (I'm a postdoc statistician at the Ottawa Institute of Systems Biology.)

You'll get more response from the NY group (we don't all check LW and discussion board regularly) by making a post to the google group/listserve:

http://groups.google.com/group/overcomingbiasnyc/topics?start=

Thanks... this should come in handy in my computational research in systems biology

A broken clock is right twice per day. If value theory is incidentally correct, it doesn't make folk theories valuable on the margins - unless of course, if people who hold folk theories do consistently better than rationalists, but then I'd question the rationalist label.

I wish I could take that much time to do this

Currently trendy is the Bayesian argument, which frequently starts with asserting that the only acceptable proper and right-thinking prior probability of God is 0.5 AAAAAARGH

(The problem here being the assumption that we start knowing nothing at all rather than that we know really quite a lot - that being the bit in the argument where a negligible probability is turned into a non-negligible one.)

(Sorry, I just had lunch with some relatively sensible theists and I'm still going AAAAAARGH)

Interesting. I'm involved in the skeptical movement, and while I've encountered a few similar to what you describe, my impression is that most skeptics don't fall into that category. Skeptics are generally proud that they update based on evidence. Indeed, the most prominent exceptions help drive this point home. PZ Myers has said repeatedly that nothing would convince him that there's a deity and he's been repeatedly hammered by most of the skeptical movement over this statement.