It would have been convenient if I’d discovered some particular key insight that convinced people. If people had said, “Oh, well, I used to think that cryonics couldn’t be plausible if no one else was doing it, but then I read about Asch’s conformity experiment and pluralistic ignorance.” Then I could just emphasize that argument, and people would sign up.
But the average experience I heard was more like, “Oh, I saw a movie that involved cryonics, and I went on Google to see if there was anything like that in real life, and found Alcor.”
Given this data, and assuming that the goal state is to have as many people signed up for cryonics as possible, wouldn’t an example of a sensible action be to rent a few billboards and put up some notices to get peoples’ attention? You’d have to come up with a slogan or something, but that wouldn’t be hard; you’d probably have hundreds more people merely seeing the billboard than reading your best argument.
Given this data, and assuming that the goal state is to have as many people signed up for cryonics as possible, wouldn’t an example of a sensible action be to rent a few billboards and put up some notices to get peoples’ attention? You’d have to come up with a slogan or something, but that wouldn’t be hard; you’d probably have hundreds more people merely seeing the billboard than reading your best argument.