This question may come off as a bit off topic : people often say cryonics is a scam. Which is the evidence for that, and to the contrary? How should I gather it?
The thing is, cryonics is a priori awfully suspect. It appeal to one of our deepest motive (not dying), is very expensive, has unusual payment plans, and is just plain weird. So the prior of it being a scam designed to rip us off is quite high. On the other hand, reading about it here, I acquired a very strong intuition that it is not a scam, or at least that Alcor and CI are serious. The problem is, I don’t have solid evidence I can tell others about.
Now, I doubt the scam argument is the main reason why people don’t buy it. But I’d like to get that argument out of the way.
I think cryonics is more likely to be a mistake than a scam, but that might just be my general belief that incompetence is much more common than malice.
Alcor: Improperly trained personnel, unkempt and ill-equipped facilities.
[...] Saul Kent invited me over to his home in Woodcrest, California to view videotapes of two Alcor cases which troubled him – but he couldn’t quite put his finger on why this was so.[...] Patients were being stabilized at a nearby hospice, transported to Alcor (~20 min away) and then CPS was discontinued, the patients were placed on the OR table and, without any ice on their heads, they were allowed to sit there at temperatures a little below normal body temperature for 1 to 1.5 hours, while burr holes were drilled, [...] smoke could be seen coming from the burr wound! Since the patient had no circulation to provide blood to carry away the enormous heat generated by the action of the burr on the bone, the temperature of the underlying bone (and brain) must have been high enough to literally cook an egg. In one case, a patient’s head was removed in the field and, because they had failed to use a rectal plug, the patient had defecated in the PIB. The result was that feces had contaminated the neck wound, and Alcor personnel were seen pouring saline over the stump of the neck whilst holding the patient’s severed head over a bucket trying to wash the fecal matter off the stump. These are just a few of the grotesque problems I observed.[...]
The operating room was unkempt. The floors were scuffed, stained, dirty, and had obviously not been waxed in a long time. [...] I wouldn’t consider medical treatment in a facility with this appearance – nor for that matter would I like to dine in a restaurant with a kitchen in such a state.
Cryonics Institute: Patient experimentation. No need to say anything else.
It was a snotty, and probably inappropriate remark. Basically I was commenting on the operational paradigm at CI, which is pretty much “ritual.” You sign up, you get frozen and it’s pretty much kumbaya, no matter how badly things go. And they go pretty badly. Go to: http://cryonics.org/refs.html#cases and start reading the case reports posted there. That’s pretty much my working definition of horrible. It seems apparent to me that “just getting frozen” is now all that is necessary for a ticket to tomorrow, and that anything else that is done is “just gravy,” and probably unnecessary to a happy outcome.
…Even in cases that CI perfuses, things go horribly wrong – often – and usually for to me bizarre and unfathomable (and careless) reasons. My dear friend and mentor Curtis Henderson was little more than straight frozen because CI President Ben Best had this idea that adding polyethylene glycol to the CPA solution would inhibit edema. Now the thing is, Ben had been told by his own researchers that PEG was incompatible with DMSO containing solutions, and resulted in gel formation. Nevertheless, he decided he would try this out on Curtis Henderson. He did NOT do any bench experiments, or do test mixes of solutions, let alone any animal studies to validate that this approach would in fact help reduce edema (it doesn’t). Instead, he prepared a batch of this untested mixture, and AFTER it gelled, he tried to perfuse Curtis with it. See my introduction to Thus Spake Curtis Henderson on this blog for how this affected me psychologically and emotionally. Needless to say, as soon as he tried to perfuse this goop, perfusion came to a screeching halt. They have pumped air into patient’s circulatory systems… I could go on and on, but all you need to do is really look at those patient case reports and think about everything that is going on in those cases critically.
The principal criticism against Trans Time was their for-profit model, in which, if funding ran out, the patients would be thawed and conventionally interred (This is what would’ve happened to Janice Foote and the Mills couple), unlike other organizations with a pay-once model in which the storage costs for the patients are covered for perpetuity.
I should add, Ray Mills was actually removed from suspension and placed in a chest full of dry ice.
You can also consider the now-defunct Cryonics Society of California, though I don’t think any of the above organizations would go as far as talking about a non-existent facility in the present tense while the patients lay on the floor, rotting.
Okay, looks like I have to lower my probability that « Alcor and CI are serious ». Now this is from over a year ago. Maybe there’s some sign things have changed since? I guess not, unless they acquired some Lukeprog like leadership.
I’ll read the whole thing to try and determine to what extent this is incompetence, and to what extent this is scammy (for instance, dust and dirt look like incompetence, but the hardened doors with plywood roof looks a bit more suspect).
It might be difficult to tell incompetence apart from malice, moreover, it is possible to transition from one to the other:
Let’s say you start a cryonics organization with all good intentions, then you start running into problems: costs are higher than expected, mishaps occur during the cryopreservation process, evidence that your process is flawed starts to accumulate and you have no idea on how to fix it, etc. So what do you do?
Apologize for the bad service you sold, thaw and bury the frozen corpses (since you know they are already damaged beyond repair), disband the organization and find a new job, risking to face legal action? That’s what a perfectly honest person would do.
But if you are not perfectly honest, you might find yourself hiding or downplaying technical issues, cutting the costs at the expense of service quality, using deceitful marketing strategies, and so on.
Maybe you could rationalize that the continued existence of your organization is so important that it should be preserved even at the cost of deceiving some people, maybe you could even deceive yourself into ignoring your essentially fraudolent behavior and maintain a positive self-image (if you were attracted to cryonics in the first place, chances are high that you are prone to wishful thinking).
But, whatever your intentions are, at this point your business has become a de facto scam.
I don’t think any of the above organizations would go as far as talking about a non-existent facility in the present tense while the patients lay on the floor, rotting.
That’s a mighty low bar to clear. Thank goodness CI and Alcor have standards.
In seriousness, it just floors me the degree to which every player worth speaking of in the field of cryonics seems to be managed (and micromanaged, at that) by Bad Decision Dinosaur. The concept of suspended animation is not inherently crackpot material; the idea that clinical death and information-theoretic death are different things (with implications for comparative medical treatment in different eras) is actually kind of profound—yet the history of cryonics is a sordid tale full of expensive boondoggles, fraud, ethical nightmares and positively macabre events. And that’s the stuff cryonicists will admit to! Look at that Alcor case: the only way I can avoid shuddering is by imagining it set to Yakety Sax.
To the best of my knowledge, doctors don’t experiment on patients without their consent, drill burr holes without circulation, or generally just do anything they want without fear of prosecution (Since cryonics is considered a form of interment, whether the person was completely turned into a glass sculpture or straight-frozen like so many people were does not affect the organizations). Doctors may forget rectal plugs or leave patients if funds are unavailable, though.
Sure, if you leave out the much longer history and ignore that it was substantially leavened with good faith efforts to restore health, arrest decline and reduce suffering, a substantial number of which also succeed.
(As for “until very recently”—flagrant abuse still happens in medicine, that’s not a thing that recently stopped happening. What I’m saying is that this simply means medicine isn’t special as an endeavor… whereas cryonics seems to have little to show for it other than that some bodies are, in fact, vitrified or just garden-variety frozen, depending, many of them even standing a good chance of being reasonably intact after going through the handling process. There’s such a vast asymmetry between the two fields; if they were really that comparable, most doctors would be this guy.
Things people are willing to pay lots of money for are a strong signal to unscrupulous people. Examples abound of people doing scams as investment advice, counterfeiting art, or selling knock-off designer jewelry. Cryonics is something where you pay a lot of money for a service many years down the line. Someone could easily take in cryonics payments for years without ever having to perform a cryopreservation, and only have it become known after they’ve disappeared with the profits. Alternately, the impossibility of checking results means that a cryonics provider can profit off of shoddy service and equipment, and you might never realize. On these lines, any organization that is unwilling to let you inspect their preservation equipment etc. is suspect in my eyes. Cryonics organizations are also susceptible to drift in motives of their owners. Maybe the creators 10 years ago were serious about cryonics, but if the current CEO or board of directors cares more about optimizing cheap equipment and profits, then that group might become a de facto scam.
In the longer run, the governance of a cryo organization should be designed to try and prevent drift. I like how Alcor requires board members to be signed up as well as to have relatives or significant others signed up, but this still doesn’t work against someone who’s actually unscrupulous.
This question may come off as a bit off topic : people often say cryonics is a scam. Which is the evidence for that, and to the contrary? How should I gather it?
The thing is, cryonics is a priori awfully suspect. It appeal to one of our deepest motive (not dying), is very expensive, has unusual payment plans, and is just plain weird. So the prior of it being a scam designed to rip us off is quite high. On the other hand, reading about it here, I acquired a very strong intuition that it is not a scam, or at least that Alcor and CI are serious. The problem is, I don’t have solid evidence I can tell others about.
Now, I doubt the scam argument is the main reason why people don’t buy it. But I’d like to get that argument out of the way.
I think cryonics is more likely to be a mistake than a scam, but that might just be my general belief that incompetence is much more common than malice.
I think there is a very good chance some cryonics organizations are in fact scams.
Good. Is this just an intuition, or can you communicate more precise reasons? A list of red flags could be useful (whether they are present or not).
Alcor: Improperly trained personnel, unkempt and ill-equipped facilities.
Source
Cryonics Institute: Patient experimentation. No need to say anything else.
Source
Trans Time:
I should add, Ray Mills was actually removed from suspension and placed in a chest full of dry ice.
You can also consider the now-defunct Cryonics Society of California, though I don’t think any of the above organizations would go as far as talking about a non-existent facility in the present tense while the patients lay on the floor, rotting.
Okay, looks like I have to lower my probability that « Alcor and CI are serious ». Now this is from over a year ago. Maybe there’s some sign things have changed since? I guess not, unless they acquired some Lukeprog like leadership.
I’ll read the whole thing to try and determine to what extent this is incompetence, and to what extent this is scammy (for instance, dust and dirt look like incompetence, but the hardened doors with plywood roof looks a bit more suspect).
It might be difficult to tell incompetence apart from malice, moreover, it is possible to transition from one to the other:
Let’s say you start a cryonics organization with all good intentions, then you start running into problems: costs are higher than expected, mishaps occur during the cryopreservation process, evidence that your process is flawed starts to accumulate and you have no idea on how to fix it, etc. So what do you do?
Apologize for the bad service you sold, thaw and bury the frozen corpses (since you know they are already damaged beyond repair), disband the organization and find a new job, risking to face legal action? That’s what a perfectly honest person would do.
But if you are not perfectly honest, you might find yourself hiding or downplaying technical issues, cutting the costs at the expense of service quality, using deceitful marketing strategies, and so on.
Maybe you could rationalize that the continued existence of your organization is so important that it should be preserved even at the cost of deceiving some people, maybe you could even deceive yourself into ignoring your essentially fraudolent behavior and maintain a positive self-image (if you were attracted to cryonics in the first place, chances are high that you are prone to wishful thinking). But, whatever your intentions are, at this point your business has become a de facto scam.
That’s a mighty low bar to clear. Thank goodness CI and Alcor have standards.
Well, I have this theory that CI stores its neuropatients in the dewar with the dead cats in it.
In seriousness, it just floors me the degree to which every player worth speaking of in the field of cryonics seems to be managed (and micromanaged, at that) by Bad Decision Dinosaur. The concept of suspended animation is not inherently crackpot material; the idea that clinical death and information-theoretic death are different things (with implications for comparative medical treatment in different eras) is actually kind of profound—yet the history of cryonics is a sordid tale full of expensive boondoggles, fraud, ethical nightmares and positively macabre events. And that’s the stuff cryonicists will admit to! Look at that Alcor case: the only way I can avoid shuddering is by imagining it set to Yakety Sax.
To the best of my knowledge, doctors don’t experiment on patients without their consent, drill burr holes without circulation, or generally just do anything they want without fear of prosecution (Since cryonics is considered a form of interment, whether the person was completely turned into a glass sculpture or straight-frozen like so many people were does not affect the organizations). Doctors may forget rectal plugs or leave patients if funds are unavailable, though.
What do you define as ‘very recently’?
Sure, if you leave out the much longer history and ignore that it was substantially leavened with good faith efforts to restore health, arrest decline and reduce suffering, a substantial number of which also succeed.
(As for “until very recently”—flagrant abuse still happens in medicine, that’s not a thing that recently stopped happening. What I’m saying is that this simply means medicine isn’t special as an endeavor… whereas cryonics seems to have little to show for it other than that some bodies are, in fact, vitrified or just garden-variety frozen, depending, many of them even standing a good chance of being reasonably intact after going through the handling process. There’s such a vast asymmetry between the two fields; if they were really that comparable, most doctors would be this guy.
Things people are willing to pay lots of money for are a strong signal to unscrupulous people. Examples abound of people doing scams as investment advice, counterfeiting art, or selling knock-off designer jewelry. Cryonics is something where you pay a lot of money for a service many years down the line. Someone could easily take in cryonics payments for years without ever having to perform a cryopreservation, and only have it become known after they’ve disappeared with the profits. Alternately, the impossibility of checking results means that a cryonics provider can profit off of shoddy service and equipment, and you might never realize. On these lines, any organization that is unwilling to let you inspect their preservation equipment etc. is suspect in my eyes. Cryonics organizations are also susceptible to drift in motives of their owners. Maybe the creators 10 years ago were serious about cryonics, but if the current CEO or board of directors cares more about optimizing cheap equipment and profits, then that group might become a de facto scam.
If I understand correctly, I can extract those flags, in descending order of redness:
Their cryopreservation facility does not exist (yet).
Their cryopreservation facility is not open to scrutiny.
Governance shows signs of “for profit” behaviour, or fail to demonstrate “non profit” behaviour.
Governance merely changed, while you trusted the previous one.
That also suggest signs of trustworthiness:
Their cryopreservation facility exists and is open to scrutiny.
This is a non profit with open and clean accounts.
They are researching or implementing technical improvements.
I’d like to have more such green and red flags, but this is starting to look actionable. Thank you.
One strong signal that I think some cryonics orgs implement is preferentially hiring people who have family members in storage.
Or pets.
In the longer run, the governance of a cryo organization should be designed to try and prevent drift. I like how Alcor requires board members to be signed up as well as to have relatives or significant others signed up, but this still doesn’t work against someone who’s actually unscrupulous.