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.
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.