Cryonics doesn’t need broad public support, it just needs to not be substantially attacked.
If we can get it filed under weird harmless hobby which has enough of a lobby that it’s not worth fucking with, I think that would be probably be enough.
If violent rage against cryonics starts building, that’s a hard problem. At the moment, I don’t know what to do about that one, except for the usual political and propaganda efforts.
I don’t know if it’s possible to get many people to actually sign up for it unless the tech for revival looks at least imminent, so public support would have to be based in principle—probably property rights and/or autonomy.
Long-lived institutions without broad public support? The only thing I can think of is Talmud study, and I don’t know if that would count as an institution.
If we can get it filed under weird harmless hobby which has enough of a lobby that it’s not worth fucking with, I think that would be probably be enough.
Okay we gain money and power now. What happens in 70-100 years when we aren’t around to wield it. Will our descendants care upon our behalf? How do we create self-sustaining social systems?
I’m not interested much in Cryo for myself (although I wouldn’t mind getting frozen for Science). But these kinds of questions matter for things like existential risk reduction that is time dependent. Like meteor deflection or FAI theory when the science of AI is getting close to human level (if it is a long hard slog, and can’t be done before we figure out how intelligence works).
I don’t know if it’s possible to get many people to actually sign up for it unless the tech for revival looks at least imminent, so public support would have to be based in principle—probably property rights and/or autonomy.
If we could get it to be a status symbol to be signed up for cryonics people will flock to it. You want to make it visible as well. Perhaps having your dewar as a coffee table or something.
Long-lived institutions without broad public support? The only thing I can think of is Talmud study, and I don’t know if that would count as an institution.
Freemasons? Although it is hard to tell how well they keep to their mission statement they might be an example of a long-lived institution that does keep their mission.
Okay we gain money and power now. What happens in 70-100 years when we aren’t around to wield it. Will our descendants care upon our behalf? How do we create self-sustaining social systems?
Good question—you obviously can’t control the future of an institution, all you can do is improve the odds.
And this isn’t something where I have actual knowledge, so anything I could say would be pulling it off the top of my head.
I don’t think the “who’d care about the early adopters?” question is a real problem—if you can get the thing going at all, it’s going to have to have a lot of regard for promises and continuity.
How would you feel if, a couple hundred years from now, there actually was a Cult of the Severed Head, with silly initiation rituals and charity fundraisers and a football team, but most of them just figured all this ‘corpsicle’ nonsense was really just symbolic, and spent most of their time arguing about which version of Robert’s Rules of Order they should be using and how to lure people away from the Rotary Club?
Wiki says that the origin of freemasonry is uncertain. Do you have better sources? Was the purpose of freemasons to help them cut rock? Or was it just a group of people who shared something banding together to help each other? E.g. freemasonry was never about cutting rock to use a Hansonianism.
I’m not suggesting we copy freemasonry whole cloth. Simply that we need to look at what social organisations survive, at all.
Freemasonry was literally never about stone work. The stone work and ideas of architecture are used as an analogy for a system of morality, as I understand it.
Cryonics doesn’t need broad public support, it just needs to not be substantially attacked.
If we can get it filed under weird harmless hobby which has enough of a lobby that it’s not worth fucking with, I think that would be probably be enough.
If violent rage against cryonics starts building, that’s a hard problem. At the moment, I don’t know what to do about that one, except for the usual political and propaganda efforts.
I don’t know if it’s possible to get many people to actually sign up for it unless the tech for revival looks at least imminent, so public support would have to be based in principle—probably property rights and/or autonomy.
Long-lived institutions without broad public support? The only thing I can think of is Talmud study, and I don’t know if that would count as an institution.
Okay we gain money and power now. What happens in 70-100 years when we aren’t around to wield it. Will our descendants care upon our behalf? How do we create self-sustaining social systems?
I’m not interested much in Cryo for myself (although I wouldn’t mind getting frozen for Science). But these kinds of questions matter for things like existential risk reduction that is time dependent. Like meteor deflection or FAI theory when the science of AI is getting close to human level (if it is a long hard slog, and can’t be done before we figure out how intelligence works).
If we could get it to be a status symbol to be signed up for cryonics people will flock to it. You want to make it visible as well. Perhaps having your dewar as a coffee table or something.
Freemasons? Although it is hard to tell how well they keep to their mission statement they might be an example of a long-lived institution that does keep their mission.
Good question—you obviously can’t control the future of an institution, all you can do is improve the odds.
And this isn’t something where I have actual knowledge, so anything I could say would be pulling it off the top of my head.
I don’t think the “who’d care about the early adopters?” question is a real problem—if you can get the thing going at all, it’s going to have to have a lot of regard for promises and continuity.
They don’t cut rocks anymore. Like, at all.
How would you feel if, a couple hundred years from now, there actually was a Cult of the Severed Head, with silly initiation rituals and charity fundraisers and a football team, but most of them just figured all this ‘corpsicle’ nonsense was really just symbolic, and spent most of their time arguing about which version of Robert’s Rules of Order they should be using and how to lure people away from the Rotary Club?
Wiki says that the origin of freemasonry is uncertain. Do you have better sources? Was the purpose of freemasons to help them cut rock? Or was it just a group of people who shared something banding together to help each other? E.g. freemasonry was never about cutting rock to use a Hansonianism.
I’m not suggesting we copy freemasonry whole cloth. Simply that we need to look at what social organisations survive, at all.
Freemasonry was literally never about stone work. The stone work and ideas of architecture are used as an analogy for a system of morality, as I understand it.
Wikipedia suggests that the theory that freemasonry evolved from stonemason’s guilds is considered at least plausible.