About half of your list is actually an OR statement (timeless identity AND brain scanning AND simulation) OR (nanites through ice), and that doesn’t even exhaustively cover the possibilities since at least it needs a term for unknown unknowns we haven’t hypothesized yet. It’s probably easiest to cover all of them with something like “it’s actually possible to turn what we’re storing when we vitrify a cryonics patient back into that person, in some form or another”.
And the vast majority of cryonicists, or at least, those in Less Wrong circles who your post are likely to reach, already accept that the probability of cryonics working is low, but exactly how low they think the probability is after considering the four assumptions your list reduces to is something they’ve definitely already considered and probably would disagree with you on, if you actually gave a number for what “very low” means to see whether we even disagree (note: if it’s above around 1%, consider how many assumptions there are in trying to achieve “longevity escape velocity”, and maybe spread your bets).
And, as others have already pointed out, belief in cryonics doesn’t really funge against longevity research. If anything, I expect the two are very strongly correlated together. At least as far as belief in them being desirable or possible goes, it’s quite apparent that they’re both ideas that are shared by a few communities such as our own and rejected by other communities including “society at large”. How much we spend on each is probably affected by e.g. cryonics being a thing you can buy for yourself right now but longevity being a public project suffering from commons problems, so the correlation might be less strong and even inverse if you check it (I would be very surprised if it actually turned out to be inverse), but if so that wouldn’t necessarily be because of the reasons you suggest.
But by no means I’m arguing against cryonics. I’m arguing for spending more resources on improving it. All sorts of biologists are working on longevity, but very few seem to work on improving vitrification. And I have a strong suspicion that it’s not because nothing can be done about it—most of the time I talked to biologists about it, we were able to pinpoint non-trivial research questions in this field.
About half of your list is actually an OR statement (timeless identity AND brain scanning AND simulation) OR (nanites through ice), and that doesn’t even exhaustively cover the possibilities since at least it needs a term for unknown unknowns we haven’t hypothesized yet. It’s probably easiest to cover all of them with something like “it’s actually possible to turn what we’re storing when we vitrify a cryonics patient back into that person, in some form or another”.
And the vast majority of cryonicists, or at least, those in Less Wrong circles who your post are likely to reach, already accept that the probability of cryonics working is low, but exactly how low they think the probability is after considering the four assumptions your list reduces to is something they’ve definitely already considered and probably would disagree with you on, if you actually gave a number for what “very low” means to see whether we even disagree (note: if it’s above around 1%, consider how many assumptions there are in trying to achieve “longevity escape velocity”, and maybe spread your bets).
And, as others have already pointed out, belief in cryonics doesn’t really funge against longevity research. If anything, I expect the two are very strongly correlated together. At least as far as belief in them being desirable or possible goes, it’s quite apparent that they’re both ideas that are shared by a few communities such as our own and rejected by other communities including “society at large”. How much we spend on each is probably affected by e.g. cryonics being a thing you can buy for yourself right now but longevity being a public project suffering from commons problems, so the correlation might be less strong and even inverse if you check it (I would be very surprised if it actually turned out to be inverse), but if so that wouldn’t necessarily be because of the reasons you suggest.
I would say it’s probably no higher than 0.1%.
But by no means I’m arguing against cryonics. I’m arguing for spending more resources on improving it. All sorts of biologists are working on longevity, but very few seem to work on improving vitrification. And I have a strong suspicion that it’s not because nothing can be done about it—most of the time I talked to biologists about it, we were able to pinpoint non-trivial research questions in this field.
I think LW looks favorably on the work of the Brain Preservation Foundation and multiple people even donated.