I am historian and sociologist of post-WWII science and technological innovation, writing my Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I would like to send you a letter outlining my work on the place of cybernetics and the cyborg sciences in the writings of cryonics progenitors Ettinger, Cooper, and Prehoda, and my interest in the historical record of cryonic suspension generally. Is there a mailing or email address I could send the letter to?

Very Best,
Grant

One last point. Despite not having any, I do pay attention to degrees and credentials. They are a good general indication of the POSSIBILITY of competence. A cardiac surgeon who never went to medical school, or dentist who is an autodidact, are not people I would normally have truck with for my health care. However, there are exceptions. I would never have had Jerry Leaf do a coronary artery bypass graft on me, unless I really needed one and he was the only guy around. He was a competent basic cardiac surgeon, but he wasn’t fast (and that’s important!) and he lacked the depth of experience of a skilled cardiothoracic surgeon. Going further, given a choice between a skilled cardiothoracic surgeon and Jerry Leaf to operate on me for my cryopreservation – well, it would have been Jerry hands down, because he was a staggeringly good cryonics surgeon. Jerry had a B.S. in Philosophy. There are plenty of people in this world whose illiterate ramblings would definitely make the absence of a high school diploma material in judging their deficits. In Yudkowsky’s case, the presence or absence of a HS diploma is, again IMHO, immaterial in the arena in which he is operating. I might not hire him as a fry cook or a cell biologist, but that’s neither here nor there. He clearly has mastery of the language, native intelligence, and the ability to persuade people to give him money (no small feat, that). I also note that he is forthright in acknowledging his educational limits. Ray Kroc (whom I once met & was tremendously impressed with), Richard Branson and Alan Sugar are/were billionaires absent a secondary school education. Peter Jennings and the Wright Brothers also come to mind. In the arenas of highly successful film and music performers I often wonder if the number of HS dropouts isn’t greater than the number of graduates. — Mike Darwin

Michael,

Unfortunately, what you describe here is an apt description of the the entire U.S. business culture and economy. It is the existential reason for the current “long” recession and why it will last at least 10 years (just like Japan after its bubble). Its a real pain in the ass for anyone who wants to make money doing anything real. I worked for two employers since my return in 2001 and both of them were utterly screwed up operationally. There’s a reason why things turned out this way, but its too long to explain here.

Once money became available, really big money, primarily from Dick Jones’ estate and from LEF, then it became possible to pay good money – market rate or better – for personnel. The Jones money was the primary impetus for this and as soon as it began to flow, what you call the “GenX Cyberpunks,” strongly supported by Carlos Mondragon, began to demand more money, in addition to full benefits. In principle there was nothing wrong with this. However, the money had the reverse effect of what would be expected; it decreased productivity. As just one example, one staff member decided he would be “more creative and less distracted” if he worked at home (it was crowded and noisy at Alcor in those days). So, he was allowed to work at home. The net effect of this was that Cryonics went from being a monthly periodical to a bimonthly one… I later heard that this employee was actually playing computer games at home and bumming around Riverside during his “home work days.”

Money also made “quick fix schemes” possible (or at least affordable). When Alcor cases began to be fouled up because critical supplies were missing or out of stock in the OR, the solution was to purchase a then ungodly expensive bar code inventory system. To my knowledge, this was never put into service. More to the point, there was no need for it. Jerry and I never had a situation occur where there were critical supplies missing because we had a good “feel” for what was on hand and we had a perfectly pedestrian paper inventory system that worked. A good short order cook in a restaurant may (rarely) run out of a necessary item if business is way over what is expected, but he doesn’t come into his kitchen on a routine basis and find he is out of eggs or potatoes or butter… That is because he actually works there every day! We were doing animal work and we knew what we had on hand – to not have a stock of 1/2″ to 3/8″ connectors, let alone not to have even one, was not even conceivable to us. Those who followed us, well, what did anyone expect?

And that leads me to my last points here. I was absolutely dumbfounded at the ease with which most of the members were willing to entrust their care to people with no experience and no inclination to get any. It was very much like seeing the members of a ‘surgical cooperative’ decide that the office secretary would do just fine replacing the neurosurgeon and that an Army band member could pinch hit for the perfusionist on the cardiac surgery team. While my paper qualifications were nil, I was still astonished, and I think it was only then that I really began to understand just how little technical competence (leaving excellence out of it) was valued in cryonics, and thus just how little I was valued. These incompetents, lazy incompetents, in fact, would have never stayed around, let alone worked in cryonics, if it didn’t pay extraordinarily well for doing little or nothing – and with benefits included! By no means was it the money alone, but the money did make it possible. If Alcor were the sole example of this phenomenon, I’d be less of a believer in money as a corrosive factor. However, I have seen it over and over again in cryonics and I am afraid that it is all too real. — Mike Darwin

I visited Alcor at the end of 1993 when it was under the domination of the Gen Xer cyberpunks (it was still in Riverside at the time). I was not impressed with them. They may have had good computer knowledge, but their knowledge of biology and materials was rather limited.

BTW, Real nanotech is showing up in all kinds of products, ranging from drug delivery to skin creams. There is a big push in the semiconductor industry to develop molecular electronics based on self-assembly chemistry to take over when the CMOS scaling reaches its limits (7nm level) later in this decade. The high vacuum thin-film techniques (deposition, patterning, and etching) cannot go below 7nm and may even be limited at 10nm. Moore’s Law ends in another 5 years or so unless they develop self-assembly fabrication. Lots of money is on the line here.

Peter Thiel’s sea steading concept is not that far out. All he is envisioning are the floating versions of Hong Kong and Singapore. There are technical hurtles to overcome, but the social, economic, and political models have been around for centuries, in the form of the city-state. All Thiel wants to do is make floating city-states.