Aubrey de Grey Discussion, 1

I discussed epistemology and cryonics with Aubrey de Grey via email. Click here to find the rest of the discussion. Yellow-highlighted quotes are from Aubrey de Grey, with permission. Bluegreen highlights are me, red highlights are other quotes. The text with no highlights is me talking. I began the discussion like this:

You endorse Alcor and CI:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/28e4v3/aubrey_de_grey_ama/cia3xn1?context=5

For the millionth time let me stress that referring to "getting older without getting sicker" as "becoming immortal" is not only inaccurate but actively counterproductive to this mission, because it entrenches the view of skeptics that the mission is quixotic. To answer the question you should have asked: obviously it depends on your age, but absolutely, everyone should have a life insurance policy with Alcor or Cryonics Institute, for exactly the same reason that they should have any other kind of health insurance.

Take a close look at Alcor and CI. While cryonics is a good idea in principle, Alcor and CI have lots of big problems (including that current cryonics technology isn't really good enough).

One big problem is not freezing people quickly. Max More, President and CEO of Alcor, writes:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/bk6/alcor_vs_cryonics_institute/69z7

You mention Mike Darwin, yet note that in Figure 11 of a recent analysis by him, he says that 48 percent of patients in Alcor's present population experienced "minimal ischemia." Of CI, Mike writes, "While this number is discouraging, it is spectacular when compared to the Cryonics Institute, where it is somewhere in the low single digits."

Alcor CEO brings up, favorably, a statistic meaning that Alcor does a bad job at least 52% of the time. Because, hey, CI does much worse, and the discussion topic is a comparison.

So I don't think you should tell people to sign up for CI and suggest it's the same quality as regular medicine.


You can find lots more information:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/bk6/alcor_vs_cryonics_institute/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/343/suspended_animation_inc_accused_of_incompetence/

(Comments include discussion from people like former Alcor President Mike Darwin.)

http://www.alcor.org/cases.html
http://www.cryonics.org/case-reports/

See e.g. the most recent CI case:

http://www.cryonics.org/case-reports/the-cryonics-institutes-123rd-patient

CI patient #123 was a 71 year old male from England. Due to the uncontrollable circumstances of this case, the patient was straight frozen without being perfused with cryoprotective solutions and was sent to the Cryonics Institute for long-term storage in liquid nitrogen.

They failed. As they often do. No cryoprotectants! And they don't care to provide details. And they indicate they won't do anything different in the future, since they consider whatever happened "uncontrollable".

The latest Alcor case is very problematic too:

http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/casesummary2680.html

They argued with a Medical Examiner for a while, then managed to get ahold of the body and began cool down 2.5 days after death. The delay sounds very worrisome to me, but the case report doesn't address this problem at all. No medical details are provided about how cool down went. And there's no explanation about what temperature the body was at for the 2.5 day delay, the resulting damage, and whether this person could reasonably be expected to ever be revived.

I like SENS. I like life. I like the idea of cryonics. But I wouldn't pay a bunch of money for the bad patient outcomes which CI and Alcor routinely provide (according even to their own claims on their websites).

Continue reading the next part of the discussion.