One thing I’ve started thinking more after first hearing of cryonics is that keeping an organization around and alive in the long term, order-of-magnitude centuries, is really hard. One of the first ways to fail in the O-ring chain of cryonics leading to successful revivification is the cryonics organization storing the vitrified bodies dissolving or becoming terminally incompetent and the bodies melting and rotting.
Concerns about health care system dysfunction notwithstanding, there is still very thick social proof that seeing an accredited doctor is a net positive when you’re ill, and also that the medical system will continue to be reasonably reliable and socially supported, so that a medicine you rely on in the long term suddenly becoming unavailable is an alarming and unexpected event, rather than a common occurrence. The social proof of cryonics orgs is mostly that they’re sort of there, about as notable as they were ten or twenty years ago and they have absolutely no buy-in from wider society or legislature. The buy-in would create expectations that random emergency responders and medical personnel will help fulfill your cryonics contract when you’re incapable of action or that there would be some reaction other than “good riddance to the charlatans” if the orgs look like they’re about to go under.
As it stands, I can apply an abstraction “if I get sick, I can go to the hospital”, because “hospital” is a robust category with the wider society. I do not feel like I can currently similarly abstractly state “I make a contract with a cryonics facility to have myself cryopreserved when I’m clinically dead”, because there currently isn’t a social category of “cryonics facility” like there is one of “hospital”. There is a small handful of particular cryonics organizations of varying appearances of competency, founded and run by people operating from a particular late 20th century techno-optimistic subculture (the one that had things like Extropianism come out of it), that seems to be both in decline and actively shunned by many ideologues of a more recent cultural zeitgeist. As it stands, I’m entirely indifferent about a hospital CEO retiring because I’m quite confident the wider society has the will and ability to perpetuate the hospital organization, but I’m quite a bit concerned what will happen with the present-day cryonics orgs when their CEOs retire, because the orgs have no similar societal support network and it also looks like we might be moving on from the cultural period that inspired competent people to found or join cryonics orgs.
I’d be substantially more confident in cryonics if it were actually supported by society with stable funding, regulations, transparency, priority in case of natural disasters, ongoing well-supported research, guarantees about future coverage of revival and treatment costs, and so on.
Even then I have strong doubts about uninterrupted maintenance of clients for anything like a hundred years. Even with the best intentions, more than 99.9999% uptime for any single organization (including through natural disasters and changes in society) is hard. And yet, that’s the easier part of the problem.
I think this is too many nines. If you have to last 100 years, say, and LN takes over a month to boil off and let the patients thaw, then it’s more like 99.9% uptime.
>if it were actually supported by society
So, I agree with this, but I want to make a clear distinction between a supposed “current default” state of the world/society, vs. what can/will actually happen. When Peter Thiel is asked to predict the future, he responds something like that he doesn’t think it quite makes sense to predict parts of the future that depend on our choices, and it makes more sense to think of it as deciding than predicting. Part of the point of my post is to point out that an important strategic consideration is, “If we all had Hope in this, then would it succeed?”, sometimes more important than “If I act in causal best-response to the current default, what can I get?”. Does this make sense to you? This is maybe the main point I want to get across.
I think this makes sense. The main things that make my probabilities still fairly high for success:
1. It doesn’t seem super complicated to keep the basic functionality going. I haven’t looked into it much, but IIUC basically you just keep putting liquid nitrogen in the dewars, and LN is not expensive or hard to produce.
2. Probably economic and technological progress is going to accelerate this century, implying more material and technological abundance, meaning that cryopreservation will be less difficult and won’t need to be for too long.
3. Part of the point of my post is to discuss the dynamic that results from people saying “Oh, well, most everyone else doesn’t want X, so X won’t succeed, so I will not act as though X will succeed”, but where this is actually a false lack of Hope. Of course, it could be a correct lack of Hope; but there’s self-reinforcing dynamics here, so I want to point out to you that “what society thinks” has some non-determinacy in it, i.e. you and people like you can to some extent in some ways choose what society thinks.
One thing I’ve started thinking more after first hearing of cryonics is that keeping an organization around and alive in the long term, order-of-magnitude centuries, is really hard. One of the first ways to fail in the O-ring chain of cryonics leading to successful revivification is the cryonics organization storing the vitrified bodies dissolving or becoming terminally incompetent and the bodies melting and rotting.
Concerns about health care system dysfunction notwithstanding, there is still very thick social proof that seeing an accredited doctor is a net positive when you’re ill, and also that the medical system will continue to be reasonably reliable and socially supported, so that a medicine you rely on in the long term suddenly becoming unavailable is an alarming and unexpected event, rather than a common occurrence. The social proof of cryonics orgs is mostly that they’re sort of there, about as notable as they were ten or twenty years ago and they have absolutely no buy-in from wider society or legislature. The buy-in would create expectations that random emergency responders and medical personnel will help fulfill your cryonics contract when you’re incapable of action or that there would be some reaction other than “good riddance to the charlatans” if the orgs look like they’re about to go under.
As it stands, I can apply an abstraction “if I get sick, I can go to the hospital”, because “hospital” is a robust category with the wider society. I do not feel like I can currently similarly abstractly state “I make a contract with a cryonics facility to have myself cryopreserved when I’m clinically dead”, because there currently isn’t a social category of “cryonics facility” like there is one of “hospital”. There is a small handful of particular cryonics organizations of varying appearances of competency, founded and run by people operating from a particular late 20th century techno-optimistic subculture (the one that had things like Extropianism come out of it), that seems to be both in decline and actively shunned by many ideologues of a more recent cultural zeitgeist. As it stands, I’m entirely indifferent about a hospital CEO retiring because I’m quite confident the wider society has the will and ability to perpetuate the hospital organization, but I’m quite a bit concerned what will happen with the present-day cryonics orgs when their CEOs retire, because the orgs have no similar societal support network and it also looks like we might be moving on from the cultural period that inspired competent people to found or join cryonics orgs.
I’d be substantially more confident in cryonics if it were actually supported by society with stable funding, regulations, transparency, priority in case of natural disasters, ongoing well-supported research, guarantees about future coverage of revival and treatment costs, and so on.
Even then I have strong doubts about uninterrupted maintenance of clients for anything like a hundred years. Even with the best intentions, more than 99.9999% uptime for any single organization (including through natural disasters and changes in society) is hard. And yet, that’s the easier part of the problem.
>99.9999%
I think this is too many nines. If you have to last 100 years, say, and LN takes over a month to boil off and let the patients thaw, then it’s more like 99.9% uptime.
>if it were actually supported by society
So, I agree with this, but I want to make a clear distinction between a supposed “current default” state of the world/society, vs. what can/will actually happen. When Peter Thiel is asked to predict the future, he responds something like that he doesn’t think it quite makes sense to predict parts of the future that depend on our choices, and it makes more sense to think of it as deciding than predicting. Part of the point of my post is to point out that an important strategic consideration is, “If we all had Hope in this, then would it succeed?”, sometimes more important than “If I act in causal best-response to the current default, what can I get?”. Does this make sense to you? This is maybe the main point I want to get across.
I think this makes sense. The main things that make my probabilities still fairly high for success:
1. It doesn’t seem super complicated to keep the basic functionality going. I haven’t looked into it much, but IIUC basically you just keep putting liquid nitrogen in the dewars, and LN is not expensive or hard to produce.
2. Probably economic and technological progress is going to accelerate this century, implying more material and technological abundance, meaning that cryopreservation will be less difficult and won’t need to be for too long.
3. Part of the point of my post is to discuss the dynamic that results from people saying “Oh, well, most everyone else doesn’t want X, so X won’t succeed, so I will not act as though X will succeed”, but where this is actually a false lack of Hope. Of course, it could be a correct lack of Hope; but there’s self-reinforcing dynamics here, so I want to point out to you that “what society thinks” has some non-determinacy in it, i.e. you and people like you can to some extent in some ways choose what society thinks.