According to the Slate article,

Yudkowsky and Peter Thiel have enthused about cryonics, the perennial favorite of rich dudes who want to live forever.

Uh, no. Surprisingly few "rich dudes" have shown an interest in cryonics. I know quite a few cryonicists and I have helped to organize cryonics-themed conferences, and to the best of my knowledge no one on the Forbes 500 list has signed up.

Moreover ordinary people can afford cryonics arrangements by using life insurance as the funding mechanism.

We can see that rich people have avoided cryonics from the fact that the things rich people really care about tend to become status signals and attract adventuresses in search of rich husbands. In reality cryonics lacks this status and it acts like "female Kryptonite." Just google the phrase "hostile wife phenomenon" to see what I mean. In other words, I tell straight men not to sign up for cryonics for the dating prospects.

Here's a recent idea I had: A tattoo that responds to blood alcohol content over a certain level (e.g. causing an itchy sensation in the skin, or releasing a small amount of something that causes nausea), making it difficult / anti-habit-forming to get drunk. I'm thinking this could solve the alcoholism problem, comprehensively, without discouraging moderate drinking or relying on willpower.

Another variant would rely on social pressure. Although that is less reliable, it could be safer or easier to implement than one that creates a physiological reaction. For this version, one would have a tattoo that is usually invisible, but becomes visible in the presence of high alcohol level. It could e.g. spell "drunk" across the person's forehead.

Of course, such an invention is not quite on par with flush toilets. Not everyone gets drunk, and it is not infectious. Alcohol is not necessary for civilization. However, comprehensively eliminating alcohol overconsumption would be pretty darned helpful and would eliminate a lot of spillover costs of alcohol consumption, like drunk driving, spousal abuse, and so forth. Moreover, ethanol in excessive doses damages the liver, heart, and skin over time.

In addition to helping people who are alcoholics or at-risk directly, a side effect of such an invention is that people who do not drink due to perceived risk of alcoholism (or reluctance to expose oneself to such a risk) would be able to start drinking. This would probably have benefits that go beyond the extra hedons. Assuming it functions as a nootropic for social characteristics, it could lead to more people being better connected socially (i.e. having more close friends).

Incidentally, I don't see a reason something along these lines could not have been developed 50+ years ago.

If you're trying to prevent information-theoretic death by preserving the brain it's critical that the information that makes you be "you" actually be preserved.

Look at it from the other side: In order to achieve information-theoretic death, it is critical that the information that makes you be "you" actually be lost.

By "lost" we mean it has to be scrambled at least enough that superintelligent computronium dyson spheres aren't going to be able to (reasonably) crack the code.

So let's say you dissolve the brain in acid. That is likely to be a good way to achieve information-theoretic death.

Leaving it to rot for a few days? Probably.

Freezing it in ice crystals? Maybe.

Vitrifying it? Probably not.

there are many aspects of the brain structure that might or might not be relevant. Is information stored in the positions of proteins within the cells? Are phosphorylation states significant? What scale of preservation is sufficient?

Any given bit of data is likely to be stored in multiple areas by multiple mechanisms, with lots of redundancy. Moreover, every time data is stored or accessed by some mechanism, there should be side effects, things you can infer the data from that aren't part of the mechanism. The complexity of the brain works in our favor, not against -- assuming we can develop good enough reductionistic models of the brain to account for all the details.

What's "ITS"? (Google 'only' hits for "it's") How much more expensive is it? Is it offer by Alcor and CI?

This is good argument capable of convincing me into pro-cryonics position, if and only if someone can follow this claim by an evidence pointing to high probability estimate that preservation and restoration will become possible during a resonable time period.

If it so happens, that cryopreservation fails to prevent information-theoretic death then value of your cryo-magazines filled with with corpses will amount to exactly 0$ (unless you also preserve the organs for transplants).

(2) is the interesting claim

So say something about it. Your whole comment is an attack on 1, but regardless of his word on whether or not thing slice vitrification is currently the best we can do, we KNOW fracturing happens with current brain preservation techniques. Liquid nitrogen is well below the glass transition, so fracturing is unavoidable.

Why should we expect fracturing/cracking to be 1 to 1?

It feels to me like the general pro-cryo advocacy here would be a bit of a double standard, at least when compared to general memes of effective altruism, shutting up and multiplying, and saving the world. If I value my life equally to the lives of others, it seems pretty obvious that there's no way by which the money spent on cryonics would be a better investment than spending it on general do-gooding.

Of course, this is not a new argument, and there are a few standard responses to it. The first one is that I don't actually value my life equally to that of everyone else's life, and that it's inconsistent to appeal to that when I don't appeal to it in my life in general. And it's certainly true that I do actually value my own life more than I value the life of a random stranger, but I do that because I'm human and can't avoid it, not because my values would endorse that as a maximally broad rule. If I get a chance to actually act in accordance to my preferred values and behave more altruistically than normal, I'll take it.

The other standard argument is that cryonics doesn't need to come out of my world-saving budget, it can come out of my leisure budget. Which is also true, but it requires that I'm interested enough in cryonics that I get enough fuzzy points from buying cryonics to make up whatever I lose in exchange. And it feels like once you take the leisure budget route, you're implicitly admitting that this is about purchasing fuzzies, not utilons, which makes it a little odd to apply to all those elaborate calculations which are often made with a strong tone of moral obligation. If one is going to be a utilitarian and use the strong tone of moral obligation, one doesn't get to use it to make the argument that one should invest a lot of money on saving just a single person, and with highly uncertain odds at that.

By going with the leisure budget argument, one is essentially admitting that cryonics isn't about altruism, it's about yourself. And of course, there is nothing wrong with that, since none of us is a 100% complete altruist who cares nothing about themselves, nor should we even try to idealize that kind of a person. And I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with signing up for cryonics - everyone gets to use their fuzzies budget the way they prefer, and if cryonices gives you the most fuzzies, cool. But if one doesn't get major fuzzies out of cryo, then that ought to be considered just as reasonable as well.

"The topic" being cryonics.

Max More just put out a response to Michio Kaku's video on the topic of cryonics. Seems to be getting some coverage (KurzweilAI, io9, geek.com).

SENS is aiming to fix our biological bodies. Cryonics researchers are working on the more permanent solution of tech that enables brain scanning.