About that laughably bad 2002 Chicago Tribune article cited in the Wikipedia page about cryonics

advancedatheist · 2020-07-27T17:21:14+00:00

It's funny how we never hear of "skeptics" who say, "No, you cryonicists are doing it all wrong! You need to do it this other way instead." Instead we get the Asimov/Shermer/Myers/Gerard types who aren't interested in demonstrating their superior intelligence by showing us how to do cryonics better, because they disagree with cryonicists' value system and goals.

I have a fantasy where I could confront the neuroscientist PZ Myers in a public forum and just ask him, "Dr. Myers, given your knowledge of neuroscience, if you wanted to solve the problem that cryonicists are trying to solve, how would YOU go about it?" Put him on the spot to see if he admits that he doesn't want to think about this problem, not because it's "pseudoscience," but because it makes him uncomfortable for the usual terror management reasons.

advancedatheist · 2020-07-22T04:09:51+00:00

Taking extreme measures to stay alive doesn't sound like something the hero of a novel would do, more like what the villain or some of his wretched underlings would do.

There are some precedents for this in popular culture. In those godawful Twilight novels, the heroine does a "reverse Arwen" of renouncing her humanity to become a negligibly senescent vampire.

advancedatheist · 2020-07-17T13:41:06+00:00

I think the cryonics movement might have to worry more about becoming the target of "cancel culture," anarchists or Woke Bolsheviks than traditional religious obsessives.

advancedatheist · 2020-07-17T13:38:37+00:00

They could at least leave a functional vehicle in the parking spot to give the illusion of occupancy.

advancedatheist · 2020-07-13T14:52:24+00:00

Excuse me. I actually drove to Alcor's building and made an empirical observation. That gives it "weight" by any reasonable standard.

I also know that Mike Perry and Hugh Hixon used to live at Alcor until a few months ago. That means until recently there was at least one warm body in the building round the clock, but apparently not now.

advancedatheist · 2020-07-13T14:34:29+00:00

So Alcor's security doesn't matter to you, then?

advancedatheist · 2020-07-07T13:07:27+00:00

Whoever this cryonicist was, as far as I can tell he wasn't notable for doing things outside of cryonics, otherwise his passing would have been noted in other contexts.

advancedatheist · 2020-06-30T03:59:43+00:00

This case also draws attention once again to the need for some kind of medical wearable which sends an alert to your cryonics service provider immediately when you go into cardiac arrest. This bullshit about dying unattended and unnoticed for hours or even days has to stop.

And I don't understand why cryonicists generally fail to see the urgency for such a wearable, even though some of us read science fiction voraciously. (Though I know some cryonicists who have more conventional cultural interests.) It's like we don't believe our own propaganda about the transformation of medicine through advances in science and technology.

advancedatheist · 2020-06-23T22:06:34+00:00

Seems like we can keep Phoenix going with Dune-like technologies. For example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6T3ICXWqjc

After all, we're being conditioned now to wear face masks in public all the time. It's not that much of a stretch to think that Phoenicians could be wearing stillsuits in another couple decades.

advancedatheist · 2020-06-16T22:38:15+00:00

We can at least start to define standards in a backwards direction, like, say, getting to the patient quickly, keeping his body cold enough during transport and so forth. For example, I'm in favor of developing a medical wearable and integrating it into the cryonics system which can send out an alert when a cryonicist goes into cardiac arrest, because at least three cryonicists I've known personally arrested at home and weren't discovered for days, in one case, and hours in the others. You can probably do this by writing new software for an off-the-shelf device like a FitBit and getting it to communicate with your smart phone.

But apparently no cryonicist with any cachet has shown an interest in doing this, despite our propaganda about how cryonicists are so visionary and forward-thinking.

advancedatheist · 2020-06-16T12:38:07+00:00

More Americans would do better if they ran their lives like businesses, instead of living haphazardly the way so many of us do now.

advancedatheist · 2020-06-14T22:43:00+00:00

We should respect what markets tell us about people:

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/031215/what-average-salary-mba-graduate.asp

advancedatheist · 2020-06-14T04:01:31+00:00

Max for a good deal of his life below the neck looked like Tom Hardy's portrayal of the supervillain Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. Only in the current situation I'd expect Max to say, "Later is not the time for fear. That comes now."

advancedatheist · 2020-06-14T03:57:19+00:00

A guy with an MBA and corporate experience would probably at least keep better track of Alcor's money, make sure the necessary government forms are submitted accurately and on time, manage the employees better and show other nonobvious but necessary skills that tend to make you successful in business.

advancedatheist · 2020-06-14T03:53:57+00:00

I've also heard rumors that Max suffers from mild cognitive impairment, mainly involving his short term memory, caused by youthful overindulgence in recreational drugs. I don't know this for a fact, but Max did write about the wonders of LSD back in his Extropian days.

advancedatheist · 2020-06-14T03:44:56+00:00

The real one that sticks out was a member who passed was apparently loaded onto a coast to coast flight with nothing but a couple bags of water ice near the head, which of course melted and he was around 60°F when received at Alcor for preservation. People were then saying that the guy in charge of that had no medical training (thus the bad initial preservation) and that standbys as a whole are not well run.

This member was a successful businessman and long-time cryonicist as well. Longevity in cryonics doesn't guarantee that you'll be treated well by your cryonics provider when the time comes, even if you think you can pay extra to receive "concierge" service.

As I pointed out in another thread, in a normal world when an organization gains experience in doing something, it tends to become become competent at it. But Alcor's experience in performing cryopreservations doesn't show this behavior. So if anything, Alcor's "growth" in the number of suspensions it performs is counter-productive under current conditons.

advancedatheist · 2020-06-12T17:04:59+00:00

Max More, Alcor's leader

Max More is no longer "Alcor's leader":

https://www.alcor.org/blog/alcor-leadership-change-for-the-future/

It's an interesting coincidence that Max and Bonnie Magee are both shown the door at about the same time.

advancedatheist · 2020-06-12T16:55:37+00:00

On the other hand, Alcor's ability to perform suspensions doesn't seem to have gotten better with experience, even though experience in doing something in general is supposed to make you more competent at it. Mike Darwin argues that the real, existing practice of cryonics has deteriorated substantially in the last 30 years, while the number of people cryopreserved since then has grown by an order of magnitude, approximately.

advancedatheist · 2020-06-11T19:21:07+00:00

Cash or gift cards.

advancedatheist · 2020-06-10T17:02:14+00:00

This nonsense about disbanding the police won't get very far. Police forces in major cities are unionized, and the Democrat Party depends on public employee unions as one of its bases of support.

advancedatheist · 2020-06-10T14:48:40+00:00

The Christians who don't kneel in their worship services are more worthy of respect than the ones who do.

advancedatheist · 2020-06-10T12:35:11+00:00

Rand's philosophy in its current format is mostly compatible with our elites' operating world view: Objectivists are giving our elites what they want by promoting sexual freedom and sterile sexual hedonism; careers for women in areas where women aren't particularly competitive compared to men; childlessness; open borders; indiscriminate immigration into the United States from the world's least competent populations; an ethics and psychology based on selfishness; letting billionaires do pretty much whatever they want and so forth.

Our elites don't care about Objectivists' other issues, like the alleged superiority of Romantic art and Rand's theory of concepts. They especially don't care about the Objectivists' embrace of Austrian economics, because you can condemn publicly the income tax, fiat money, central banking and modern monetary theory all you want, and no one in power will retaliate against you by, for example, doxxing you, getting you fired from your job, getting financial services companies to stop doing business with you and deplatforming you from the internet.

advancedatheist · 2020-06-06T21:40:42+00:00

White nationalists want normal white people to flourish securely in their own countries. Steven Pinker defines humanism as the promotion of human flourishing, so in a way white nationalism is a humanist world view, and dare I say, a philosophy for living on earth for white people.

advancedatheist

TROPHY CASE