Please, please, please don’t let the distaste of a certain epistemic disposition interfere with a decision that has a very clear potential for vast sums of positive or negative utility. Argument should screen off that kind of perceived signaling. Maybe it’s true that there is a legion of evil Randian cryonauts that only care about sucking every last bit out of their mortal lives because the Christian background they’ve almost but not quite forgotten raised them with an almost pitiable but mostly contemptible fear of death. Folks like you are much more enlightened and have read up on your Hofstadter and Buddhism and Epicureanism; you’re offended that these death-fearing creatures that are so like you didn’t put in the extra effort to go farther along the path of becoming wiser. But that shouldn’t matter: if you kinda sorta like living (even if death would be okay too), and you can see how cryonics isn’t magical and that it has at least a small chance of letting you live for a long time (long enough to decide if you want to keep living, at least!), then you don’t have to refrain from duly considering those facts out of a desire to signal distaste for the seemingly bad epistemic or moral status of those who are also interested in cryonics and the way their preachings sound like the dogma of a forgotten faith. Not when your life probabilistically hangs in the balance.
(By the way, I’m not a cryonaut and don’t intend to become one; I think there are strong arguments against cryonics, but I think the ones you’ve given are not good.)
Please, please, please don’t let the distaste of a certain epistemic disposition interfere with a decision that has a very clear potential for vast sums of positive or negative utility. Argument should screen off that kind of perceived signaling. Maybe it’s true that there is a legion of evil Randian cryonauts that only care about sucking every last bit out of their mortal lives because the Christian background they’ve almost but not quite forgotten raised them with an almost pitiable but mostly contemptible fear of death. Folks like you are much more enlightened and have read up on your Hofstadter and Buddhism and Epicureanism; you’re offended that these death-fearing creatures that are so like you didn’t put in the extra effort to go farther along the path of becoming wiser. But that shouldn’t matter: if you kinda sorta like living (even if death would be okay too), and you can see how cryonics isn’t magical and that it has at least a small chance of letting you live for a long time (long enough to decide if you want to keep living, at least!), then you don’t have to refrain from duly considering those facts out of a desire to signal distaste for the seemingly bad epistemic or moral status of those who are also interested in cryonics and the way their preachings sound like the dogma of a forgotten faith. Not when your life probabilistically hangs in the balance.
(By the way, I’m not a cryonaut and don’t intend to become one; I think there are strong arguments against cryonics, but I think the ones you’ve given are not good.)