Most of these issues I was already aware of, though I did have a brief “holy crap” moment when I read this parenthetical statement:
such as keeping certain cryopatients on dry ice for two weeks
But following the links to the explanation, I don’t think this impacts considerably my estimate of CI’s competence / trustworthiness. This specific issue only affects people who didn’t sign up for cryonics in advance, comes with an understandable (if not correct) rationale, and comes with acknowledgement that it’s less likely to work than the approach they use for people who were signed up for cryonics before their deaths.
Their position may not be entirely rational, but I didn’t previously have any illusions about cryonics organizations being entirely rational (it seems to me cryonics literature has too much emphasis on the possibility of reviving the original meat as opposed to uploading.)
But following the links to the explanation, I don’t think this impacts considerably my estimate of CI’s competence / trustworthiness. This specific issue only affects people who didn’t sign up for cryonics in advance, comes with an understandable (if not correct) rationale, and comes with acknowledgement that it’s less likely to work than the approach they use for people who were signed up for cryonics before their deaths.
“less likely to work” seems a bit of an euphemism. I think that the chances that this works are essentially negligible even if cryopreservation under best condition did work (which is already unlikely).
My point is that even if they don’t apply this procedure to all their patients, the fact that CI are offering it means that they are either interested in maximizing profit instead of success probability, and/or they don’t know what they are doing, which is consistent with some claims by Mike Darwin (who, however, might have had an axe to grind).
Signing up for cryonics is always buying a pig in a poke because you have no way of directly evaluating the quality of the provider work within your lifetime, therefore the reputation of the provider is paramount. If the provider behaves in a way which is consistent with greed or incompetence, it is an extremely bad sign.
Read a bit of Mike Darwin’s complaints, those look more serious. I will have to look into that further. Can you give me a better sense of your true (not just lower bound) estimate of the chances there’s something wrong with cryonics orgs on an institutional level that would lead to inadequate preservation even if in theory they had a working procedure in theory?
I’m not sure how to condense my informal intuition into a single number. I would say > 0.5 and < 0.9, closer to the upper bound (and even closer for the Cryonics Institute than for Alcor).
Most of these issues I was already aware of, though I did have a brief “holy crap” moment when I read this parenthetical statement:
But following the links to the explanation, I don’t think this impacts considerably my estimate of CI’s competence / trustworthiness. This specific issue only affects people who didn’t sign up for cryonics in advance, comes with an understandable (if not correct) rationale, and comes with acknowledgement that it’s less likely to work than the approach they use for people who were signed up for cryonics before their deaths.
Their position may not be entirely rational, but I didn’t previously have any illusions about cryonics organizations being entirely rational (it seems to me cryonics literature has too much emphasis on the possibility of reviving the original meat as opposed to uploading.)
“less likely to work” seems a bit of an euphemism. I think that the chances that this works are essentially negligible even if cryopreservation under best condition did work (which is already unlikely).
My point is that even if they don’t apply this procedure to all their patients, the fact that CI are offering it means that they are either interested in maximizing profit instead of success probability, and/or they don’t know what they are doing, which is consistent with some claims by Mike Darwin (who, however, might have had an axe to grind).
Signing up for cryonics is always buying a pig in a poke because you have no way of directly evaluating the quality of the provider work within your lifetime, therefore the reputation of the provider is paramount. If the provider behaves in a way which is consistent with greed or incompetence, it is an extremely bad sign.
Read a bit of Mike Darwin’s complaints, those look more serious. I will have to look into that further. Can you give me a better sense of your true (not just lower bound) estimate of the chances there’s something wrong with cryonics orgs on an institutional level that would lead to inadequate preservation even if in theory they had a working procedure in theory?
I’m not sure how to condense my informal intuition into a single number. I would say > 0.5 and < 0.9, closer to the upper bound (and even closer for the Cryonics Institute than for Alcor).