Do you know why cryonics is not more heavily advertised? Thinking about it for 30 seconds gives me some hypotheses but I’m too socially distant to make a reliable guess.
I like the mockery explanation. Cryonics is as about as socially acceptable as furry fandom; if furries scraped up a few millions for some TV spots, do you think they would get more or less members in the long run? There is such a thing as bad publicity.
And existing cryonics members might be exasperated—money used for advertising is money not used for research or long-term sustainability (I hear Alcor runs at a loss).
I’m pretty sure that at the root, most furries are furries because of anthropomorphized animal cartoon shows. I think a well designed commercial could push a lot of people over the edge.
Thanks, now I have an entertaining conspiracy theory about Avatar.
Cryonics is as about as socially acceptable as furry fandom
This is a myth. Techno-filia is very much part of our culture. Science fiction dominates our movies. People would scramble to sign up for cryonics if the infrastructure was there and they were certain it wasn’t a scam. But that’s a big IF. And that’s the IF—this idea of parents not choosing cryonics because they’re lousy parents is a huge MYTH invented right on the spot. Parents don’t have access to cryonics.
(If a cryonics company is reading this: I do suggest an ad campaign. I think the image you project should be ‘safe household product’: something completely established and solid that people can sign up for and sign out of easily—just a basic, mundane service. No complications and lots of options. People aren’t signing they’re life away, they’re buying a service. And it’s just suspension till a later date—I’d stay well clear of any utopian pseudo-religious stuff.)
I won’t try to judge the original statement, but I do think that people believing cryonics to be a scam is a serious problem—much more serious than I would have believed. I have talked to some friends (very bright friends with computer science backgrounds, in the process of getting college degrees) about the idea, and a shockingly large number of them seemed quite certain that Alcor was a scam. I managed to dissuade maybe one of those, but in the process I think I convinced at least one more that I was a sucker.
Reasoning by perceptual recognition. Cryonics seems weird and involves money, therefore it’s perceptually recognized as a scam. The fact that it would be immensely labor-intensive to develop the suspension tech, isn’t marketed well or at all really, and would have a very poor payoff on invested labor as scams go, will have little impact on this. The lightning-fast perceptual system hath spoken.
I’m surprised that you say your friends are computer programmers. Programmers need to be capable of abstract thought.
It has struck me that if you wanted to set out to create a profitable scam, cryonics looks like quite a good idea. I don’t have any particular reason to think that actual cryonics companies are a scam but it does seem like something of a perfect crime. It’s almost like a perfect Ponzi scheme.
Currently it is set up as a bit of a Ponzi scheme; without new people coming in (and donations) these companies wouldn’t survive very long. But then, with a little tweaking you could apply that analysis to any business with customers to make it look like a Ponzi scheme.
Could you write this up in more detail somewhere? The claim is that the “patient care trust” doesn’t need new customers to be financially viable, and should keep going even if the primary business fails. If this isn’t true it would be worth drawing attention to.
For some value of “running at a loss”, i.e. where you interpret that as “would run at a loss if it weren’t for donations and bequests”.
Given the nature of their business, donations and bequests do not strike me as an anomalous source of revenue. I do plan on asking for more information on the nature of these revenues before signing up.
However, this is an issue quite separate from the viability of the patient care trust, which is set up to keep suspendees as they are even in the case of a failure of the “main business”.
Most businesses deliver a product or service to their customers much sooner after receiving their money than a cryonics company does. Those customers also tend to be alive and so in a position to complain if they are not satisfied with their purchase.
Suppose I choose CI, and pay up now for a lifetime membership. I will pay $1250 once, and in parallel build up $200K insurance policy designating CI as the beneficiary. The only part of the money CI sees now is the $1.2K. No small sum, but neither it is more than a tiny fraction of the salaries and costs CI verifiably pays.
At 40, I can reasonably expect to go 30 to 40 years before I die. At any time during this period, if it becomes apparent that CI is up to anything screwy, I can (so I understand) change my insurance policy back; or at any rate contest their claim to it.
If you want to defraud customers, there are quicker, cheaper, more reliable ways to do it.
This would require cryonics companies to lie about their finances. Otherwise they have no way to extract money from their reserves without alarming customers.
Banks have been lying about their finances for years. Cryonics companies would hardly be unusual in the current economic climate if they were lying about their finances. I have some AAA rated mortgage backed securities for sale if anyone’s interested.
To be clear, I actually don’t think cryonics companies are scams. I just think that if you wanted to set up a scam, cryonics would be a promising avenue.
I think the complexity thing is overblown for banks to be honest. If you believe the MSM you might get that impression, but credit default swaps, collaterized debt obligations, mortgage backed securities and the rest of the TLAs behind the financial crisis are not actually difficult to understand for anyone with a basic grasp of maths. The idea that such instruments are fundamentally complex largely stems from the mathematical ineptitude of most people in the media. If you have trouble understanding the concept of percentages then a credit default swap probably seems quite confusing.
It seems very unpromising indeed to me. Could you explain how you’d pull it off? Would you publish falsified accounts, for example? Bear in mind that you’re competing with existing providers and operating in a community which talks to each other; if existing providers think you’re a scammer, they will say so, and they are polite about each other.
Scam is perhaps a little strong, but it does seem like a perfect Ponzi scheme. The basic idea of a Ponzi scheme is that you can pay off your existing investors with the proceeds from new investors, as long as your existing investors are happy with your annual reports of profits.
Cryonics promises an indefinitely deferred payoff—you pay into the fund now for a chance at a huge payoff sometime after you die. As long as you can sustain a positive cash-flow you never have to pay out from the fund. People won’t get suspicious for quite a while—you can always claim you don’t want to risk damaging your charges by subjecting them to experimental revival procedures. If you don’t believe in what you’re selling you’ll be (permanently) dead before anybody gets suspicious. Meanwhile you will have enthusiastic customers evangelizing you based on their huge ‘paper profits’ - they’ve paid you a paltry $300 a year for the promise of eternal life.
If Bernie Madoff could get away with cooking the books for 20 years in one of the most heavily regulated industries in the US with the relative handicap (compared to cryonics) of actually having to pay out on occasion then it is at least plausible that a cryonics company could be a profitable enterprise for someone who did not believe in cryonics. Of course, if it is easy to verify that they are storing brains in liquid nitrogen it doesn’t necessarily matter if it’s a scam.
I’d publish legal accounts. If I get to play by the same accounting rules as a ‘too big to fail’ bank then I wouldn’t call them honest accounts.
You actually don’t need to do anything illegal or even that morally questionable to make good money from an insurance business. People pay you to hold their money. It’s why Warren Buffet loves insurance companies:
The Power of Float
The source of our insurance funds is “float,” which is money that doesn’t belong to us but that we temporarily hold. Most of our float arises because (1) premiums are paid upfront though the service we provide—insurance protection—is delivered over a period that usually covers a year and; (2) loss events that occur today do not always result in our immediately paying claims, because it sometimes takes many years for losses to be reported (asbestos losses would be an example), negotiated and settled. The $20 million of float that came with our 1967 purchase (National Indemnity- NICO) has now increased—both by way of internal growth and acquisitions—to $46.1 billion.
Float is wonderful—if it doesn’t come at a high price. Its cost is determined by underwriting results, meaning how the expenses and losses we will ultimately pay compare with the premiums we have received. When an underwriting profit is achieved—as has been the case at Berkshire in about half of the 38 years we have been in the insurance business—float is better than free. In such years, we are actually paid for holding other people’s money.
(emphasis mine)
Cryonics seems like a pretty great source of ‘float’.
Yes, I encountered this too from several of my friends. One was almost mockingly certain that I was considering giving money to a group of scamsters, though they had no specific comments on Alcor or CI’s published financial information.
(For the record for when people I know find this post—I have not actually overcome the inertia and signed up. This is largely due to the fact that my living relatives are likely to have control over the disposition of my remains, so there is little point in signing up for cryonics unless I can get up the nerve to talk to them about it.)
Why? It’ll be a huge boost for cryonics when the first person is brought back. People will be able to see with their own eyes, for the first time, that it actually works. Until then, it’s still speculative.
Whether the people who provide the service believe in their service or not, services that rely on technology we don’t have available yet are scams. I’m sure that there are people in Alcor who feel extra pressure, knowing that if cryonics doesn’t work, they’re essentially scamming their members.
You are thinking of scam in the sense of ‘deliberate fraud’. A quick survey of definitions on the web support your sense as by far the dominant one, and mine more or less non-existent. I was meaning scam in the sense of wasting your money, and certainly including the case of deliberate fraud.
Think about it from the point of view of the mother that must make smart economical decisions in order to make sure the bills are paid each month; if she told me that cryonics was a ‘scam’ I would understand her meaning.
I think Eliezer describes this sense of scam quite well here, because indeed it doesn’t make a difference for this sense if the cryonics companies have good intentions, and are working really intensively, and are in the hole financially. I just disagree there is any problem with this quick perception, from that mother’s point of view. She’s still thinking, ‘a fool and his money are easily parted’.
I’m not such a mother. I bought two of those “One Laptop Per Child” OLPC laptops for $400 two years ago. I was willing to invest in an idea I cared about, even though it didn’t seem like it was going to work.
Were they a scam? I think they had great intentions … but if there isn’t a child somewhere with a laptop because of my purchase, then, yes, they were. Even if this is just because OLPC hadn’t anticipated that adults would take the laptops and resell them.
And, finally, I don’t know for certain but I suspect that many of the medium-type persons that contact relatives and tell fortunes have sincere intentions of some kind.
Now that you’ve discovered the standard meaning of the phrase “scam”, I think it would be best if we stuck to it rather than gratuitously switching to a private language. Perhaps there is another term that covers the whole category of expenditures that don’t work out the way you want.
Perhaps we’re coming from different perspectives, but my point of view is that you’re being gratuitously aggressive. (Consider the wording of your first two sentences and imagine it read with a snarl, as I did.) Is that going to be the general result of this post here on Less Wrong?
I don’t make big sweeping apologies unless it (a) actually matters, and I feel badly or (b) the polite context of the exchange is established so that it is not an unfair status hit.
If you insist of making me take a status hit that I think is unfair—even though I’ve lost karma for this whole exchange, and MichaelGR already told me he didn’t agree with my use of the word, and I already sound like a jerk throughout the whole exchange because I keep changing my mind about whether or not people think cryonics is a deliberate scam—then I’ll have to admit that I just don’t think my broader usage of ‘scam’ is so uncommon.
Here are 2 examples of people using ‘scam’ in the sense I mean.
So that I only want to reply sarcastically so sorry I used a word that wasn’t immediately agreed with by everyone.
I am including all of this as an immediate-case-study response relevant to the post Logical Rudeness, to write what goes through my head when I’m pressed for a formal statement of defeat when I felt I had already made polite concessions. I think otherwise—without the reason to call attention to these thoughts—I would have just written something slightly passive aggressive, but mostly even more concessionary then the latest concession.
Everyone’s in a mood on LW today, it seems, and I don’t exclude myself. I meant to come across with a much lighter tone than that, to be sure, and I don’t mean to commit the sin that C S Lewis describes so well in “The Screwtape Letters” of insisting that one’s own words be taken strictly at face value while reading every possible connotation and side meaning into the words of others.
But I really do think that using the term “scam” in this way is inadvisable, and that the links you provide are using the term in a hyperbolic way, to smuggle in the implication of insincerity on the part of the providers without proof. I really think that “scam” denotes the wrong concept and certainly strongly carries the wrong connotations. whpearson’s suggestion of “boondoggle” is a good one.
I’m not sure how to address what you say about “status”. But I like to think that one of the things we’re better at here is conceding gracefully and accepting it gracefully. If I’ve given the discussion an emotional charge that makes that difficult, that wasn’t my intent.
I voted you up. Your latest comment left me feeling expansive rather than defensive, and that feels like a much better place to be rationally.
So I’m not sure why, in this expansive mood, I’m stll not willing to fully agree. For now I’ll call it “stubbornness of purpose”—I do want to ‘smuggle in’ those negative connotations while describing the negative feelings people have for cryonics—and think about whether this is a flaw in character or rationality or something more positive or neutral.
Even in a world where cryonics works, we could imagine a “cryonics scam” where a company took money for cryonics and then didn’t freeze/revive people.
I guess it depends on what you mean by “work”. If I gave my money to a cryonics company and and they purposely didn’t freeze me or revive me, I would say that it didn’t work.
But we’re talking about whether or not people would trust it wasn’t a scam, even if it wasn’t.
If the infrastructure for something is in place then people usually do trust that it isn’t a scam. (Infrastructure often means safeguards against scamming anyway.) Most people trust hospitals to provide medical care.
Well, actually that’s a good example. Even though hospitals have a lot of infrastructure throughout the country, people still have a limited trust in them. There are often good reasons for this. And then people are supposed to turn around and have boundless faith in the operations of a tiny, private, nearly secret company?
Because I’m sure that some of them have good intentions. They might know that they’re doing their best to give people a chance, but if they’re human (?) they would also feel the responsibility of all these people depending upon them.
All you say in this comment seems true, but not the part in your previous comment about “if cryonics doesn’t work, they’re essentially scamming their members.”
If I pay firefighters to extinguish the fire that is burning down my house, and they try, do the best they can under the conditions they have to work in, but my house still burns down in the end, have they scammed me?
I don’t think “scam” is the right word.
I’m sure the employees of cryonics organizations would be extremely disappointed if cryonics somehow didn’t work, and they would probably feel sad for the loss of many potential lives, but if they actually tried their best, I highly doubt that they’d feel like they did something morally wrong or scam-like.
AFAIK, no serious Cryonics organization with actual facilities is guaranteeing a result (being revived). In legalese, it’s a “best efforts obligation” rather than an “obligation to achieve a specific result”.
I concede that the service that they’re actually providing is an opportunity for revival only. That has a value, and people are willing to pay for that value.
The cryonics facility owner who thinks of it exactly like this will sleep well at night. However, people usually have more complex relationships with reality. The cryonics owner knows he is selling optimism about cryonics. Do you think he would feel that it was moral to continue selling memberships if he thought the probability was virtually zero?
AFAYCT? You think most Americans are irrational. Why would you expect to have a good model of how they think?
Take sexing of babies. At first, ‘people’ were vocal about how it wouldn’t be natural to know the baby’s sex, and people still extol the virtues of ‘being surprised’ when the baby is born. But it was something doctors offered and over time, pragmatic people ignored critical voices and started doing it, and culture changed.
Culture is changed by being normal. ‘People’ probably dislike the idea of cryonics because you connect it with singularity concepts—your utopia is not everyone’s utopia. Let them imagine their own future.
Your comment is not internally consistent. You present a model which predicts that people will not sign up for cryonics even if they think it is not a scam.
Well the first contradiction was that I was giving ad advice to a company I accused of being elitist. The contradiction was not lost upon me; but if I have a probability that they’re doing X, I can hedge by also betting on Y. Anyway, a cryonics company isn’t a monolith; I’m sure they’ve got their different internal perspectives. Which leads to my second set of contradictions about people—but people aren’t a monolith either.
Young husbands will go along with cryonics because they like Terminator, and 40-something mothers will go along with cryonics because there isn’t a cure for that chromosomal anomaly now but there might be in 5 years. Or maybe it will buy someone extra time to have another baby to provide cord blood. The problem is trying to sell them a vision of a weird far distant future instead of just providing a service.
Anecdote: I read sci-fi as a kid, learned of the concept of cryonics, thought it was a good idea if it worked… and then it never occurred to me to research whether it was a real technology. Surely I would have heard of it if it was? Then years later I ran into a mention on OvercomingBias and signed up pretty much immediately.
The way people say “it’s science fiction” as if it tells you anything at all about the plausibility of what’s under discussion drives me crazy. Doctor Who and communications satellites are both science fiction.
Source ? A non-sustainable cryonics organization is one you don’t want to be signed up with. These dewars use electricity (EDIT: oops, no they don’t; substitute “rental for the space to store them”).
I should mention that I define ‘running at a loss’ as not being able to pay all bills out of either investment income or out of fees (membership dues, freezing fees, etc.); if there is a gap between expenses and the former, then they are running at a loss and depending on the charity of others to make it up.
And this is the case. In 2008, they spent $1.7 million—but they got 622k for freezing, and ~300k in fees & income, for a total of $990,999. In other words, Alcor is not currently self-sustaining.
(Why aren’t they bankrupt? Because of $1,357,239 in ‘contributions, gifts, and grants’, and ‘noncash contributions’ of $753,979.)
Not advertising is a clear signal. If any company wants the masses, they advertise to the masses. If Proctor & Gamble comes out with a great new detergent, they’re not going to wait for people to do the research and find out about them.
Doesn’t, um, thinking about that for like 30 seconds tell you how unlikely it is?
Do you know why cryonics is not more heavily advertised? Thinking about it for 30 seconds gives me some hypotheses but I’m too socially distant to make a reliable guess.
I like the mockery explanation. Cryonics is as about as socially acceptable as furry fandom; if furries scraped up a few millions for some TV spots, do you think they would get more or less members in the long run? There is such a thing as bad publicity.
And existing cryonics members might be exasperated—money used for advertising is money not used for research or long-term sustainability (I hear Alcor runs at a loss).
I’m pretty sure that at the root, most furries are furries because of anthropomorphized animal cartoon shows. I think a well designed commercial could push a lot of people over the edge.
Thanks, now I have an entertaining conspiracy theory about Avatar.
This is a myth. Techno-filia is very much part of our culture. Science fiction dominates our movies. People would scramble to sign up for cryonics if the infrastructure was there and they were certain it wasn’t a scam. But that’s a big IF. And that’s the IF—this idea of parents not choosing cryonics because they’re lousy parents is a huge MYTH invented right on the spot. Parents don’t have access to cryonics.
(If a cryonics company is reading this: I do suggest an ad campaign. I think the image you project should be ‘safe household product’: something completely established and solid that people can sign up for and sign out of easily—just a basic, mundane service. No complications and lots of options. People aren’t signing they’re life away, they’re buying a service. And it’s just suspension till a later date—I’d stay well clear of any utopian pseudo-religious stuff.)
AFAICT your statement is simply false.
I won’t try to judge the original statement, but I do think that people believing cryonics to be a scam is a serious problem—much more serious than I would have believed. I have talked to some friends (very bright friends with computer science backgrounds, in the process of getting college degrees) about the idea, and a shockingly large number of them seemed quite certain that Alcor was a scam. I managed to dissuade maybe one of those, but in the process I think I convinced at least one more that I was a sucker.
Reasoning by perceptual recognition. Cryonics seems weird and involves money, therefore it’s perceptually recognized as a scam. The fact that it would be immensely labor-intensive to develop the suspension tech, isn’t marketed well or at all really, and would have a very poor payoff on invested labor as scams go, will have little impact on this. The lightning-fast perceptual system hath spoken.
I’m surprised that you say your friends are computer programmers. Programmers need to be capable of abstract thought.
It has struck me that if you wanted to set out to create a profitable scam, cryonics looks like quite a good idea. I don’t have any particular reason to think that actual cryonics companies are a scam but it does seem like something of a perfect crime. It’s almost like a perfect Ponzi scheme.
Currently it is set up as a bit of a Ponzi scheme; without new people coming in (and donations) these companies wouldn’t survive very long. But then, with a little tweaking you could apply that analysis to any business with customers to make it look like a Ponzi scheme.
Could you write this up in more detail somewhere? The claim is that the “patient care trust” doesn’t need new customers to be financially viable, and should keep going even if the primary business fails. If this isn’t true it would be worth drawing attention to.
Alcor is running at a loss
I do believe they would be capable of running within their means if they had to.
For some value of “running at a loss”, i.e. where you interpret that as “would run at a loss if it weren’t for donations and bequests”.
Given the nature of their business, donations and bequests do not strike me as an anomalous source of revenue. I do plan on asking for more information on the nature of these revenues before signing up.
However, this is an issue quite separate from the viability of the patient care trust, which is set up to keep suspendees as they are even in the case of a failure of the “main business”.
Most businesses deliver a product or service to their customers much sooner after receiving their money than a cryonics company does. Those customers also tend to be alive and so in a position to complain if they are not satisfied with their purchase.
Let’s try to make this concrete.
Suppose I choose CI, and pay up now for a lifetime membership. I will pay $1250 once, and in parallel build up $200K insurance policy designating CI as the beneficiary. The only part of the money CI sees now is the $1.2K. No small sum, but neither it is more than a tiny fraction of the salaries and costs CI verifiably pays.
At 40, I can reasonably expect to go 30 to 40 years before I die. At any time during this period, if it becomes apparent that CI is up to anything screwy, I can (so I understand) change my insurance policy back; or at any rate contest their claim to it.
If you want to defraud customers, there are quicker, cheaper, more reliable ways to do it.
There are people currently being stored are there not?
Indeed there are.
As the reasoning above suggests, they tend to be people who have known and watched the cryonics organizations for a long time, up close and personal.
This would require cryonics companies to lie about their finances. Otherwise they have no way to extract money from their reserves without alarming customers.
Banks have been lying about their finances for years. Cryonics companies would hardly be unusual in the current economic climate if they were lying about their finances. I have some AAA rated mortgage backed securities for sale if anyone’s interested.
Banks hide their deception not only in actual secrecy but also in overwhelming complexity.
To be clear, I actually don’t think cryonics companies are scams. I just think that if you wanted to set up a scam, cryonics would be a promising avenue.
I think the complexity thing is overblown for banks to be honest. If you believe the MSM you might get that impression, but credit default swaps, collaterized debt obligations, mortgage backed securities and the rest of the TLAs behind the financial crisis are not actually difficult to understand for anyone with a basic grasp of maths. The idea that such instruments are fundamentally complex largely stems from the mathematical ineptitude of most people in the media. If you have trouble understanding the concept of percentages then a credit default swap probably seems quite confusing.
It seems very unpromising indeed to me. Could you explain how you’d pull it off? Would you publish falsified accounts, for example? Bear in mind that you’re competing with existing providers and operating in a community which talks to each other; if existing providers think you’re a scammer, they will say so, and they are polite about each other.
Scam is perhaps a little strong, but it does seem like a perfect Ponzi scheme. The basic idea of a Ponzi scheme is that you can pay off your existing investors with the proceeds from new investors, as long as your existing investors are happy with your annual reports of profits.
Cryonics promises an indefinitely deferred payoff—you pay into the fund now for a chance at a huge payoff sometime after you die. As long as you can sustain a positive cash-flow you never have to pay out from the fund. People won’t get suspicious for quite a while—you can always claim you don’t want to risk damaging your charges by subjecting them to experimental revival procedures. If you don’t believe in what you’re selling you’ll be (permanently) dead before anybody gets suspicious. Meanwhile you will have enthusiastic customers evangelizing you based on their huge ‘paper profits’ - they’ve paid you a paltry $300 a year for the promise of eternal life.
If Bernie Madoff could get away with cooking the books for 20 years in one of the most heavily regulated industries in the US with the relative handicap (compared to cryonics) of actually having to pay out on occasion then it is at least plausible that a cryonics company could be a profitable enterprise for someone who did not believe in cryonics. Of course, if it is easy to verify that they are storing brains in liquid nitrogen it doesn’t necessarily matter if it’s a scam.
So you’d publish honest, or at least non-fraudulent, accounts?
I’d publish legal accounts. If I get to play by the same accounting rules as a ‘too big to fail’ bank then I wouldn’t call them honest accounts.
You actually don’t need to do anything illegal or even that morally questionable to make good money from an insurance business. People pay you to hold their money. It’s why Warren Buffet loves insurance companies:
(emphasis mine)
Cryonics seems like a pretty great source of ‘float’.
You’ve said so once. This second instance is thus an attempt at proof by repeated assertion. Actual reasoning would be preferred.
Yes, I encountered this too from several of my friends. One was almost mockingly certain that I was considering giving money to a group of scamsters, though they had no specific comments on Alcor or CI’s published financial information.
(For the record for when people I know find this post—I have not actually overcome the inertia and signed up. This is largely due to the fact that my living relatives are likely to have control over the disposition of my remains, so there is little point in signing up for cryonics unless I can get up the nerve to talk to them about it.)
Why? It’ll be a huge boost for cryonics when the first person is brought back. People will be able to see with their own eyes, for the first time, that it actually works. Until then, it’s still speculative.
“certain it would work” != “certain it’s not a scam”
Things that work are usually not called scams.
Pills that cure cancer for $5000 a month are scams. People who can contact deceased loved ones are offering scams.
Whether the people who provide the service believe in their service or not, services that rely on technology we don’t have available yet are scams. I’m sure that there are people in Alcor who feel extra pressure, knowing that if cryonics doesn’t work, they’re essentially scamming their members.
The point is the other side of the implication: things that are not scams don’t always work.
You are thinking of scam in the sense of ‘deliberate fraud’. A quick survey of definitions on the web support your sense as by far the dominant one, and mine more or less non-existent. I was meaning scam in the sense of wasting your money, and certainly including the case of deliberate fraud.
Think about it from the point of view of the mother that must make smart economical decisions in order to make sure the bills are paid each month; if she told me that cryonics was a ‘scam’ I would understand her meaning.
I think Eliezer describes this sense of scam quite well here, because indeed it doesn’t make a difference for this sense if the cryonics companies have good intentions, and are working really intensively, and are in the hole financially. I just disagree there is any problem with this quick perception, from that mother’s point of view. She’s still thinking, ‘a fool and his money are easily parted’.
I’m not such a mother. I bought two of those “One Laptop Per Child” OLPC laptops for $400 two years ago. I was willing to invest in an idea I cared about, even though it didn’t seem like it was going to work.
Were they a scam? I think they had great intentions … but if there isn’t a child somewhere with a laptop because of my purchase, then, yes, they were. Even if this is just because OLPC hadn’t anticipated that adults would take the laptops and resell them.
And, finally, I don’t know for certain but I suspect that many of the medium-type persons that contact relatives and tell fortunes have sincere intentions of some kind.
Now that you’ve discovered the standard meaning of the phrase “scam”, I think it would be best if we stuck to it rather than gratuitously switching to a private language. Perhaps there is another term that covers the whole category of expenditures that don’t work out the way you want.
Perhaps we’re coming from different perspectives, but my point of view is that you’re being gratuitously aggressive. (Consider the wording of your first two sentences and imagine it read with a snarl, as I did.) Is that going to be the general result of this post here on Less Wrong?
I don’t make big sweeping apologies unless it (a) actually matters, and I feel badly or (b) the polite context of the exchange is established so that it is not an unfair status hit.
If you insist of making me take a status hit that I think is unfair—even though I’ve lost karma for this whole exchange, and MichaelGR already told me he didn’t agree with my use of the word, and I already sound like a jerk throughout the whole exchange because I keep changing my mind about whether or not people think cryonics is a deliberate scam—then I’ll have to admit that I just don’t think my broader usage of ‘scam’ is so uncommon.
Here are 2 examples of people using ‘scam’ in the sense I mean.
The Bottled Water Scam
Whole Life Insurance is a Scam
So that I only want to reply sarcastically so sorry I used a word that wasn’t immediately agreed with by everyone.
I am including all of this as an immediate-case-study response relevant to the post Logical Rudeness, to write what goes through my head when I’m pressed for a formal statement of defeat when I felt I had already made polite concessions. I think otherwise—without the reason to call attention to these thoughts—I would have just written something slightly passive aggressive, but mostly even more concessionary then the latest concession.
Everyone’s in a mood on LW today, it seems, and I don’t exclude myself. I meant to come across with a much lighter tone than that, to be sure, and I don’t mean to commit the sin that C S Lewis describes so well in “The Screwtape Letters” of insisting that one’s own words be taken strictly at face value while reading every possible connotation and side meaning into the words of others.
But I really do think that using the term “scam” in this way is inadvisable, and that the links you provide are using the term in a hyperbolic way, to smuggle in the implication of insincerity on the part of the providers without proof. I really think that “scam” denotes the wrong concept and certainly strongly carries the wrong connotations. whpearson’s suggestion of “boondoggle” is a good one.
I’m not sure how to address what you say about “status”. But I like to think that one of the things we’re better at here is conceding gracefully and accepting it gracefully. If I’ve given the discussion an emotional charge that makes that difficult, that wasn’t my intent.
I voted you up. Your latest comment left me feeling expansive rather than defensive, and that feels like a much better place to be rationally.
So I’m not sure why, in this expansive mood, I’m stll not willing to fully agree. For now I’ll call it “stubbornness of purpose”—I do want to ‘smuggle in’ those negative connotations while describing the negative feelings people have for cryonics—and think about whether this is a flaw in character or rationality or something more positive or neutral.
How about Boondoggle)
Excellent!
Even in a world where cryonics works, we could imagine a “cryonics scam” where a company took money for cryonics and then didn’t freeze/revive people.
I guess it depends on what you mean by “work”. If I gave my money to a cryonics company and and they purposely didn’t freeze me or revive me, I would say that it didn’t work.
But we’re talking about whether or not people would trust it wasn’t a scam, even if it wasn’t.
If the infrastructure for something is in place then people usually do trust that it isn’t a scam. (Infrastructure often means safeguards against scamming anyway.) Most people trust hospitals to provide medical care.
Well, actually that’s a good example. Even though hospitals have a lot of infrastructure throughout the country, people still have a limited trust in them. There are often good reasons for this. And then people are supposed to turn around and have boundless faith in the operations of a tiny, private, nearly secret company?
Why?
EDIT: Why are you sure of this, I mean.
Because I’m sure that some of them have good intentions. They might know that they’re doing their best to give people a chance, but if they’re human (?) they would also feel the responsibility of all these people depending upon them.
All you say in this comment seems true, but not the part in your previous comment about “if cryonics doesn’t work, they’re essentially scamming their members.”
If I pay firefighters to extinguish the fire that is burning down my house, and they try, do the best they can under the conditions they have to work in, but my house still burns down in the end, have they scammed me?
I don’t think “scam” is the right word.
I’m sure the employees of cryonics organizations would be extremely disappointed if cryonics somehow didn’t work, and they would probably feel sad for the loss of many potential lives, but if they actually tried their best, I highly doubt that they’d feel like they did something morally wrong or scam-like.
AFAIK, no serious Cryonics organization with actual facilities is guaranteeing a result (being revived). In legalese, it’s a “best efforts obligation” rather than an “obligation to achieve a specific result”.
I concede that the service that they’re actually providing is an opportunity for revival only. That has a value, and people are willing to pay for that value.
The cryonics facility owner who thinks of it exactly like this will sleep well at night. However, people usually have more complex relationships with reality. The cryonics owner knows he is selling optimism about cryonics. Do you think he would feel that it was moral to continue selling memberships if he thought the probability was virtually zero?
Unless the seller is withholding information that would change the buyers’ estimates, how he feels about the product is immaterial.
AFAYCT? You think most Americans are irrational. Why would you expect to have a good model of how they think?
Take sexing of babies. At first, ‘people’ were vocal about how it wouldn’t be natural to know the baby’s sex, and people still extol the virtues of ‘being surprised’ when the baby is born. But it was something doctors offered and over time, pragmatic people ignored critical voices and started doing it, and culture changed.
Culture is changed by being normal. ‘People’ probably dislike the idea of cryonics because you connect it with singularity concepts—your utopia is not everyone’s utopia. Let them imagine their own future.
Your comment is not internally consistent. You present a model which predicts that people will not sign up for cryonics even if they think it is not a scam.
It’s a generally true thing, not a worked out linear argument.
I contend that parents don’t have access to cryonics. The rest is just random bullets of indignation.
Which just goes to say, you see what I’m saying? There you go.
Yes, and the fact that they contradict one another is significant to me.
Well the first contradiction was that I was giving ad advice to a company I accused of being elitist. The contradiction was not lost upon me; but if I have a probability that they’re doing X, I can hedge by also betting on Y. Anyway, a cryonics company isn’t a monolith; I’m sure they’ve got their different internal perspectives. Which leads to my second set of contradictions about people—but people aren’t a monolith either.
Young husbands will go along with cryonics because they like Terminator, and 40-something mothers will go along with cryonics because there isn’t a cure for that chromosomal anomaly now but there might be in 5 years. Or maybe it will buy someone extra time to have another baby to provide cord blood. The problem is trying to sell them a vision of a weird far distant future instead of just providing a service.
I think byrnema has a point. I don’t think most people are even aware that cryonics isn’t sci-fi anymore.
Anecdote: I read sci-fi as a kid, learned of the concept of cryonics, thought it was a good idea if it worked… and then it never occurred to me to research whether it was a real technology. Surely I would have heard of it if it was?
Then years later I ran into a mention on OvercomingBias and signed up pretty much immediately.
The way people say “it’s science fiction” as if it tells you anything at all about the plausibility of what’s under discussion drives me crazy. Doctor Who and communications satellites are both science fiction.
Source ? A non-sustainable cryonics organization is one you don’t want to be signed up with. These dewars use electricity (EDIT: oops, no they don’t; substitute “rental for the space to store them”).
You still need to create the nitrogen in the first place.
But you can read the financial statements yourself: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/financial.html (Seriously, am I the only person here who can look things up? The answers are on, like, page 10.)
I should mention that I define ‘running at a loss’ as not being able to pay all bills out of either investment income or out of fees (membership dues, freezing fees, etc.); if there is a gap between expenses and the former, then they are running at a loss and depending on the charity of others to make it up.
And this is the case. In 2008, they spent $1.7 million—but they got 622k for freezing, and ~300k in fees & income, for a total of $990,999. In other words, Alcor is not currently self-sustaining.
(Why aren’t they bankrupt? Because of $1,357,239 in ‘contributions, gifts, and grants’, and ‘noncash contributions’ of $753,979.)
Thanks, that’s useful info.
Not advertising is a clear signal. If any company wants the masses, they advertise to the masses. If Proctor & Gamble comes out with a great new detergent, they’re not going to wait for people to do the research and find out about them.
A clear signal that cryonics companies don’t have an advertising budget?
The more I think about it the more likely it seems… So: finding out about them is the first barrier to entry.