Following Up On Cryonics in the Media
A recent New York Times article on cryonics generated a fair amount of discussion online. I thought that I would provide a few quotes and pointers for those who would like to browse, but you should read the Times article first.
Tyler Thursday on cryonics: "My question is: why not save someone else’s life instead?" ... Tyler’s argument is hard to follow here. Is he merely saying the world is better if anyone acts more contrary to type, expresses less relative to instrumenting, or donates more to charity? If so, why pick on cryonics and tech nerds in particular, why not just rail in general against all expressing, typed-acts, and non-charity?
Peggy Jackson, Robin Hanson’s wife, wonders “what’s so good about me that I’m going to live forever?” This is a strange presumption to make about life and death. Our culture generally does not have this presumption about moral worth and non-existence. As a general rule, we do not feel that someone has to justify her reason to seek medical care and try to remain alive.
while many dislike cryonics because they see it as especially selfish, in fact cryonics has such huge scale effects that buying cryonics seems to me a pretty good charity in its own right.
Compared to cryonics, the ashes-into-space industry has over half as many delivered customers, collected in a far shorter time and with far less free publicity. While cryonics is on average more expensive, the cheapest cryonics option, $28,000 via CI, is cheaper than the most expensive ash launch. While space-ash customers are even more male dominated, and probably just as tech nerdy, my intuition guesses they suffer far less "hostile-wife phenomena" than cryonics. (Will someone please check?) And I’d guess this reduced hostility has much less to do with costs than image – cryonics freaks folks out more. Why?
Cryonics and the Hanson Family
Still, I would have written the piece a little differently. To me, the primary questions are "What is the probability that cryonics works?," and "What counts as 'working'"? If cryonics genuinely had a 5% chance of giving Robin ten extra years of healthy life, then Robin's right, and Peggy's just plain wrong. If, in contrast, cryonics had a 5% chance of eventually creating a mere computer simulation of Robin, but only a one-in-a-million chance of reviving the flesh-and-blood man, cryonics does indeed seem like an undue financial and emotional burden on his family.
While there are more than the usual number of people talking about cryonics of late, we shouldn't forget that the staff and volunteers of cryonics organizations continue to do their work in the background, just as they did before this latest burst of publicity. See this recent Alcor posting, for example, which is illuminating as ever as to how a cryonics provider actually works in practice:
In what has become the busiest 12 months of any previous year in Alcor's history, we have cryopreserved three additional members during this past month of June.A-2371, who maintained confidentiality with respect to his membership, resided in Cleveland, Ohio. Alcor initiated an eight-day standby when the member fell critically ill during the month of May. The standby ended when the member's condition improved and he was inevitably discharged from the hospital. Roughly a month later however, the individual returned to the hospital and was placed on life support. When all efforts to correct his medical issues had failed the family made the decision to discontinue all supportive measures. Anticipating that this action would result in clinical death, the family preferred to wait until the entire team and equipment were in place at the member's bedside.
Suspended Animation was requested to join Alcor's Aaron Drake, already on standby, for a full deployment. All team members, including a surgeon and perfusionist, were in place prior to discontinuing the life support. The member's health continued to decline for another 18 hours before he was pronounced by hospital staff. Immediate stabilization, cool down and a field washout were performed and the patient was shipped to Alcor by air ambulance. We achieved full perfusion of the brain and an estimated net perfusion of 95%, including the body. On June 11th, A-2371 becomes our 96th patient.
Doing beats talking about doing. In a better world, we would all tend to pay more attention to the people who are getting things done rather than filling out column inches.