As a scientist I am keenly interested in the outcome of my experiments. As a cryonicist I’m even more keenly interested in the outcome of Chronosphere, because I believe that a paradigm shift in cryonics is essential to its success, if not to its very survival. I will go further and say that the same paradigm shift is also essential to the survival not of just Mike Darwin, or any other individual of our species, but to humanity as a whole. However, I won’t belabor those points now. My purpose here is simply to report on one measure of progress, namely how many views Chronosphere receives per day.
Both the trend and the absolute numbers are important and by both criteria Chronosophere is progressing. At just under 4 months of operation the number of views per month is well over 8,000. The daily average is ~ 200, with a high of 340 and a low of 115. Most days over the past month have been well above 200.
It is possible to tell a little more about the character and the quality of the traffic by examining which individual posts are accessed. This helps to separate out casual browsers and stumbled upon hits from those genuinely interested in the content. My seat of the pants evaluation of that data indicates that roughly 50 people are paying reasonably close attention to what is being said here on a regular basis. Beyond that, the existing statistical tools do not allow much more to be inferred.
Other indices are even more subjective and unreliable, but I’ll report them anyway. Google searches related to cryonics and to topics in medicine touched upon in Chronosphere show significant use of the unique illustrations present in these posts. There is also increasing mention of Chronosphere posts in blogs and web commentary – interestingly most of which is unrelated to cryonics. Perhaps even more interestingly, on the various cryonics chat forums there is virtually no mention of either Chronosphere, or any individual articles or posts which have appeared here.
Thanks should certainly be given to Aschwin deWolf for his consistent referencing of those Chronosphere posts he deems worthwhile and relevant on his excellent blog, Depressed Metabolism. I believe there is now significant overlap in the cryonicist readership of both sites.
I also note with wry amusement that Chronosphere now beats out the “ChronoSphere Command & Conquer Wiki” and “ChronoSphere Red Alert” sites on Google searches where the search term is “chronosphere.” Both of these “other” chronosphere sites are related to the Westwood Studios video game franchise of the same name.
Finally, I am disappointed at the relative lack of commentary and of the total absence of others willing to contribute content to the site. Perhaps continued growth in readership will help to address this problem. – Mike Darwin
there basically is no such thing as a cryonics community. We cryos are socially dysfunctional to a significant degree. But a cryonics org has to be a very social endeavor. That is why cryonics is basically a bust.
It is important to keep planting links in diverse locations (e.g. notice my use of reddit and mailing lissts to promote selected posts) in order to bootstrap awareness. I would try to abstain from being slashdotted, as the current server hardware will not be able to serve that many hits. However, using Facebook and other social network media is definitely necessary.
As to lack of other contributors, I would imagine they’re intimidated by the quality of your posts.
we are THIS CLOSE to going viral on facebook!
Mike,
I don’t know if I appear in your statistics, but I am one of your regular readers (via Google reader). I think you should try posting smaller items more frequently. It is rare for me to be able to read most of your material till the end because I just don’t have the time, despite the high quality and my interest.
Thank you for the excellent work, and greetings from Brazil.
Guilherme
Thanks for the positive feedback. Also, thanks a lot for your comments on post lengths. First, when it comes to the nontechnical posts they are (mostly) way too long – and mostly unnecessarily so. I’m not sure what to do about this since it is just where my head happens to be right now. I don’t so much write, per se, as the writing writes itself. I think in this case and at this time I am exploring and discovering ideas as I go along. In the past, I was mostly articulating well thought out and much discussed ideas that were ready to be turned into tight, polished articles. That’s not so today. There are other issues at work here as well which I won’t go into now. Finally, this is thefirst time I’ve written without an editor. It’s ironic, because I begged and pleaded with a number of people who are now veery angry with me to vet my writing and provide prepublication feedback. I can underastand their refusal – I’m not really resistant to criticism and readily yield to most suggestions, however editing the volume of material here is a mahor chore and is quite time consuming.
Finally, for lack of any otheer place to put it, I’m dumping large volumes of technical material to the web. I wish this could be more organized since a fair bit of this material comprises a textbook on basic cryonics science and technology. However, if I waited till all the Chapters were finished in order, I’d very likely be dead. I’ve decided that the most important thing is to get the material well distributed. So, those pieces are long and I think that this is necessary, even though it is likely to alienate readers who don’t have that kind of material as a priority. Since there is no other more appropriate venue it ends up here.
I would really like to hear a bit about you and how you became interested in cryonics (if indeed you are)? What kind of activity is there in Brazil? What are your person goals and expectations vis a vis cryonics and life extension? — Mike Darwin
I think most of the growth in cryonics during the 80′s came from the space community. It was Eric Drexler’s concept of nanotechnology, along with real R&D at Alcor, that made cryonics palatable to the space people. There is not much of a space movement today and the GenX and GenY cyberpunks have gravitated towards the AI singularity stuff and think that cryonics is unnecessary.
This is not the case. Certainly some of the growth was from people involved in AMROC, and who were otherwise associated with the privatization of space. But they did not constitute the bulk of the growth. One of the great values in doing demographic studies and/or to structuring your membership and signup paperwork in a way that lets you build a profile of the people you are recruiting, is that it helps to prevent you from seeing what you want to see, or what you think you should see. It is accurate to say that the largest cohort of members recruited during this period were male, in IT or technology related enterprises, and fit the cryonics member “archetype.” However, this was just the largest cohort. Members were recruited from a pretty wide range of other work demographics, with the most common thread being that they tended be independent – contractors, small business owners, or people who held jobs that allowed for a fair degree of creativity and nonconformity. Most were also college educated. There was also a growing cohort of wealthy, successful businessmen.
Finally, we saw an increasing number of people who most closely fit the pattern of the 1st generation cryonicists. These were typically middle aged to older individuals with no particularly striking feature other being independent minded and possibly a little stubborn. They were often single or widowed, financially responsible, and otherwise just “average folks” who had no remarkable interest in the “future,” in IT, or in technology in general. The strong common factors were that they did NOT want to die and very much wanted to LIVE. This was very much the demographic of the 1st generation of cryonicists, as well.
If you look over the roster of people now in LN2 who got there because they signed up themselves, it is remarkable for its diversity and for the lack of any special fixation on the future as a utopia.
In fact, cryonics recruited almost none of the comparatively large population of futurists, SF fans, and others whose world view was of the future as a paradise. In fact, that trait seemed to be an active contraindication to involvement in cryonics. Until very recently, I never understood why this was the case. Now, I think the most likely explanation is that the future for these people was (and is) a daydream – it’s a place where they can go inside their heads to escape a life they are very unhappy living. It is also a perfect place – seemingly eternal and totally under the control of the person who is dreaming it. Cryonics? Cryonics is horrible; it is literally the antithesis of that action-less dream state. Cryonics makes the future real and it makes it mutable and worst of all, it gives the lie to the idea that the future is completely within your control as an individual and a benign or perfect place in the bargain. Only daydreams fit the bill for that kind of world. In short, cryonics was the worst nightmare imaginable for these people and I think that’s why so many of them not only didn’t choose it; they HATED it. –Mike Darwin
> This was very much the demographic of the 1st generation of cryonicists, as well.
If you look over the roster of people now in LN2 who got there because they signed up themselves, it is remarkable for its diversity and for the lack of any special fixation on the future as a utopia.
FWIW, the demographics is something I’d like to read about. The stereotype of rich white techies getting frozen is an annoying one, and I think I’ve actually seen it used as an argument against cryonics (it being immoral to support a technology/organization which is organized solely for the benefit of dead (literally) white males and diverting resources from starving black children etc.).
Expats might make a good target market for cryonics. Expats like adventure, which is why they are expats, and they are certainly independent and non-conformist. I’ve discussed cryonics with expats, say, in a bar in Taiwan or Japan and have received cautiously positive responses. You see, expats like adventure and they want the adventure to continue into the indefinite future.
I’m not being facetious here, but so do gangsters and drug lords by those criteria. What they have in common is independant thinking, outsider status, and a wider experience of the world as it truly is, outside of the snug bed of decent civilization. Unfortunately, they also share the same barriers to closing the sale; they are mobile, disenfranchied, and don’t trust bureaucraric institutions like Alcor and CI. — MIke Darwin
Both of you might find Hugo de Garis’s book of interest:
Multis and Monos; What the Multicultured Can Teach the Monocultured Towards the Creation of a Global State
http://www.amazon.com/Multis-Multicultured-Monocultured-Towards-Creation/dp/0882801627/
Mark, here is the link to Lindquist dissertation, “Corporate Survival:” http://cryoeuro.eu:8080/pages/viewpageattachments.action?pageId=425990&sortBy=date&highlight=Corporate+Survival%2C+Lindquist.doc&
– Mike Darwin
>In fact, cryonics recruited almost none of the comparatively large population of futurists, SF fans, and others whose world view was of the future as a paradise. In fact, that trait seemed to be an active contraindication to involvement in cryonics.
I’ve read some of Thomas Donaldson’s writings in the 1970′s, thanks to your digital archiving efforts, which I really appreciate, Mike. Donaldson’s view of “the future” emphasizes continuity with current conditions, and the fact that we still have a long, hard slog ahead of us in our quest for survival. In fact, Donaldson writes that you might have to go into cryonic suspension, or use its successor technologies, repeatedly down the centuries and millennia because of the remaining causes of deanimation which will still have no known treatments at the time of your medical emergency. In later years Donaldson criticized nanotech & singularity cultism and its belief in an imminent paradise.
In other words, Donaldson sounds like an adult and a sage compared with the mentally juvenile transhumanists who keep predicting “mind uploading” and “immortality” by 2045 or whatever year they’ve pulled out of their asses lately; and I find myself basically in agreement with him.
The cryonics movement would probably benefit from thinking more like Donaldson and less like the singularity obsessives.
Donaldson was probably right. Aubrey de Grey has said much the same thing. Curing aging does not guarantee immortality. There are probably things (developmental stuff) that will kill you even after aging is cured. Then, there’s always accidents where you cannot be repaired immediately as well as that old standby, infectious agents, some of which may not be natural.
Yes, think about it. If someone told you they just bought their last computer, because due to self-maintaining nanotechnology it will never break down, well that’s great! But what doesthat mean, exactly? Ok, so the computer will never have a burned out circuit or bad HD sector. But what about data storage, and even more imnportantly, what about DATA ORGANIZATION? The human brain is not built to just run on and on for centuries. We ASSUME that it is, because we apparently don’t get anywhere close to the storage capacity in a 120 years. But if we propose to live vastly longer, then problems like what do you do with all that data, and how do you organize it, start to crop up. You then enter the era of “software diseases and deaths. “You can’t escape the fact that until you actually start trying to live forvever, you wopn’thave a clue as to what new things there will be that can kill you. That was Donaldson’s central point and it was a damn good one . — Mike Darwin
Mike, The biggest issues facing us once we cure aging will be developmental. For example, most fish do not age. Yet, they have finite life spans. This is because of differential growth and development. Their overall bodies grow at a faster rate than many of their internal organs. They ultimately die because their organs cannot sustain their bodies. This is the kind of stuff we will face, say, at 150 or 200 years old.
I don’t think memory storage limits will be as much of an issue as you do. As we live on and on and the limits are reached, the older memories will simply be replaced by new ones. When you’re 500 years old (and basking in the rays of, say, Epsilon Eridani), you’re not going to remember good ole Earth and all of the good (and bad) times you had there. This is how I think it plays out.
As Aubrey put it, its going to be a nice roller coaster ride for the next few centuries.
This is why they (used to) forcibly teach history in schools, and scripture in churches. A couple of years ago I was talking with the President of a cryonics organization and I mentioned BACS – the Bay Area Cryonics Society. The person had never heard of it – thought I was making it up – didn’t have a clue that ACS used to be BACS. Today, very few people know anything about Thomas Donaldson, other than that he sued the Attorney General of California to get cryopreserved before legal death because he had a brain tumor. What a pity, and what a dangerous situation. Thomas was a brilliant thinker in cryonics and some of his ideas have proved critically important. He was unquestionably the first person to seriously consider the problem of institutional life span as it relates to cryonics. The problem was, there were simply no decent data 30 years ago. It took the resources of a major financial institution to get just the preliminary data.
For instance, I would be very much surprised if Mathew Sullivan, who has made a mini-crusade out of mocking my concerns over cryonics’ institutional structure and stability (Cold Filter) has read those critically important essays by Thomas. I was re-sensitized to the issue of corporate stability some years ago when I began going on “expeditions” for a most unusual project. The project’s founder and funder is obsessed with failure modes on all scales – from civilizations to individuals. It was through him that I came into contact with Arie De Geus’ work. Donaldson’s essays on the subject of institutional liongevity had primed me perfectly to realize what a windfall this work was. When I actually got a look at the Shell study (yes, I’ve seen it) I was bowled over by what I found. Corporations are about as evolved as wolves – they only last ~12 years on average. Why is that? You know, if you think about it, that is an amazing thing, because they have no DNA and no set biology that programs them to die. And yet, if you look at the data, the SHAPE of the curves screams out that there are some powerful and uniform phenomena operating.
In other words, it’s not like the mean life span for corporations is 12 years purely because of infant mortality, or because life spans are scattered randomly across that time frame. Yes, infant mortality is enormous. But past that, the mean lifespan for successful corporations is ~45 years. And the curve of the decline looks very ballistic. In individual corporations the decay curve is very much like aging in mammals. I would also note that in animals undergoing rapid evolution the fetal loss rate and infant mortality rate are quite high.
In any event, these are fascinating things! But what is perhaps more fascinating is that the current crop of cryonics organizations leaders NEVER give these issues a first thought – or if they do – they aren’t telling us. The attitude seems to be that failure is something that happens to THEM and not to US; very much like most people think death is something that happens to others, and not themselves. – Mike Darwin
Amazon’s affiliated vendors have that book for sale for as little as a $0.01, plus $3.99 S&H in the U.S.
Mark, you may alaso be interested in “Corporate Survival: An inquiry into the nature and causes of the survival of companies.” It is a Master’s thesis by Göran Lindqvist and Martin Sebesta of the Stockholm School of Economics and was degended in 1999. I have it asa word file and I will upload it to CryoEuro and you may access it there. It’s about 120 pages long and is a quite substantial work based in large measure on De Gues’ insights. — Mike Darwin
Apparently it doesn’t occur to these cryonicists that our current lives will become “history” soon enough. Yet they expect people in Future World to care enough about our historical existence to want to try to revive us. If Future People display the sort of indifference to history many cryonicists display now, they won’t bother to keep us in suspension, much less attempt revival.
No, it doesn’t occur to them, because they are currently on the “inside” and we are not. Some months ago, when the attacks from Maxim-Johnson were quite fierce and I again became actively involved in cryonics in a public way, a long time Alcor insider snapped at me something to this effect, “Well you may want back inside, but I can tell you, I’ve had my fill…” Of course, this person is still “inside.” To be inside means you are sure you are a part of Alcor. But that isn’t really so. In fact, it is the other wat around, Alcor is a part of you – it’s like you’ve acquired a parasitic infection, because now you will do whatever is necessary to defend Alcor; right or wrong. But the reverse is most certainly not the case. My response to this remark was to say that all I want is to survive. Ultimately, it is up to Alcor to decide whether it is better off with me inside the tent pissing out, or outside the tent pissing in (to quote the late President Lyndon Johnson). Either way, I’m goingto pursue my survival. While it is true that I think that would also be good for Alcor, ultimately, I have no say in that decision. That’s what Boards, Officers and CEOs or for. You seem to be in the same position.– Mike Darwin
Yeah, I liked Donaldson’s writings too. Its too bad he’s “in the dewer” now because we could certainly learn from him. I also liked what he had to say about biotechnology/nanotechnology (because I think he was spot on about the technical issues involved) as well as what a post-mortal society will really be like to live in (if you’ve lived as an expat for an extended period of time, you’ll do better than someone who has not).
I disagreed with him on two points. First, he thought cryonics could survive just fine while remaining small. I think the more people involved with it, the better its chances of survival. Second, he thought we really did not need a “product” to successfully market cryonics. What I mean by a “product” is a sufficiently viable neuro-preservation (brain vitrification) such that people with some technical knowledge could put two and two together and see a plausibility of reanimation based on viable brain preservation combined with some kind of stem-cell based whole body regeneration. More people are accepting the possibility that we can regrow organs and limbs with stem-cell regeneration at some point in the future. This makes the argument of reanimation more plausible to people if the neuro-preservation is demonstrably good. I argued that such a “product” is necessary for greater acceptance of cryonics.
Hm, my previous comment seemed to get eaten. Try again with a remembered summary.
Your numbers are pretty good considering how very long, niche, intimidating, and unactionable your content is. They’re better than mine: http://www.gwern.net/About#february-2011—july-2011
Thanks for the feedback and for your participation here. I don’t really have much understanding of the blogosphere – and very little about the mechanics of stats and what they mean. In cryonics, if you ask someone who is blogging for stats, you won’t get them, at least I don’t. If there’s more information it would be helpful for me to provide, just let me know. If I’m not giving info its probably a result of ignorance, not intent. — Mike Darwin
Well, I’m not really a blog expert either. As I said, mine is not much more popular and I only started back in October/November 2010, so I’m not even particularly experienced… But as for statistics I would look at (in my Google Analytics account, dunno what you have):
> Finally, I am disappointed at the relative lack of commentary and of the total absence of others willing to contribute content to the site. Perhaps continued growth in readership will help to address this problem.
One of the stats most interesting to me for gwern.net is the ‘referring sites’ statistics. Often, you will find you are considerably underestimating how much discussion a popular post lead to because you are looking at the wrong places.
My most recent article on the Silk Road (http://www.gwern.net/Silk%20Road) is very popular, but you would not know this looking at the Disqus comments – there are *none*. But if I looked at ‘referring sites’, I would see the 2000 visits came primarily from Reddit, and I could see what is happening there, and then I would discover 53 comments (including my own) on the page http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/imoc0/using_silk_road/ I would also notice that >100 visits came from Hacker News despite the very low ranking of my submission there. This would all guide me in the future – ‘Hacker News & Reddit = good’.
Another metric I sometimes look at is the ‘time on page’ metric. If time on page averages out to something bad like 30 seconds, then that tells me that people are intimidated by length and not actually reading it. If I’m particularly interested, I can break down that average into more detailed numbers for time-ranges – x visitors spent 0-1 minutes, y visitors spent 1-5 minutes etc. (I’ve only bothered once with the site-wide numbers, but it confirmed what I expected – many visitors bounce quickly, after a few seconds, but another large group settle down and seem to read the whole article, whatever that was.)
Promotion-wise, I think you could probably do a lot better. The articles on the cryonics procedure wouldn’t be generally interesting, but the aging or Cold War or silo or cryonics history or Google N-gram would appeal to a decent audience, I think, on Reddit or Hacker News.
Many thanks for these observations and instructions. I would love to know what my “time on page” stats are, but as far as I can tell, my stat plugin does not have that function. Maybe I am just missing it?
BTW, I thought your comments about the “obscurantist” nature of Chronosphere were a hoot! And that brings me to an important point: I’m not looking for numbers, so much as I’m looking for the right kind of people. Now, to some extent that will indeed be a function of numbers. But, consider this: in the late 1970s when I decided to start pushing cryonics in Indianapolis, IN, I never reached large numbers of people. However, I did reach the right ones – at least enough of them to get started. When I worked to ramp Alcor up in the early to mid-1980s, again I reached comparatively few people, but yet again, I found the right ones.
I’m not arguingthat wide exposure isn’t essential, because it clearly helps. Brian Wowk was recruited to cryonics via a mass mailing to thousands of people in the 1980s paid for by LEF and sent out to their membership as well as to other lists. Still, focusingon raw numbers alone isn’t enough. Similarly, while I definitely need to refine my message and make it more on point, I’m not the least bit concerned that it is going to beopaque to 99.999% of the population. I wouldn’t know what to do with even 5% of the population if it showed up on my doorstep. In short, I’m not aiming atthe consumer and I’m not selling or promoting cryonics. In fact, if anything, I’m the best critic of cryonics there is. LessWrong has this thread about arguments against cryonics:http://lesswrong.com/lw/1r0/a_survey_of_anticryonics_writing/ which I find intensely amusing because so far, no one there has cottoned onto any of the really good ones. Hint: I just posted one over the last two days here.
I want very smart and very motivated people who are curious, adventurous and still largely unharmed by life and free of burnout. Alas, wantinghand having are two very different things. — Mike Darwin
MIKE WROTE:
“Similarly, while I definitely need to refine my message and make it more on point, I’m not the least bit concerned that it is going to be opaque to 99.999% of the population. I wouldn’t know what to do with even 5% of the population if it showed up on my doorstep. ”
Ha ha…I don’t think you have any worries, there….
MIKE WROTE:
“I want very smart and very motivated people who are curious, adventurous and still largely unharmed by life and free of burnout. Alas, wanting and having are two very different things.”
The Mike Darwin Cryonics Cult…er..Club!
Tee hee!
You write: “MIKE WROTE:
“I want very smart and very motivated people who are curious, adventurous and still largely unharmed by life and free of burnout. Alas, wanting and having are two very different things.”
The Mike Darwin Cryonics Cult…er..Club!
Tee hee!”
Yeah, well, let’s see how that worked out last time. Someone recently snarled at me that I should be happy as a clam since, and I quote, “Mike Darwin proteges are now in virtually complete control of cryonics.”
“What the fuck do you mean by that smart ass remark?” I replied.
“Well, think about it,” came the reply. “Ben Best is President of CI, Max More is President of Alcor. Steve Bridge was President of Alcor, and that was entirely your idea, and Brian Wowk is probably the most influential scientist in cryonics other than Greg Fahy. And BTW, you were also bosom buddies with Greg Fahy.”
I wish I could say I was momentarily sick to my stomach, but the fact is I’m still sick to my stomach these many months later.
A couple of days ago I got a letter from Steve Bridge which conisted of one line to the effect that he was “ashamed to be my friend.” I’ve been told that Max More despises me and “wanted to cut my head off with no intention of freezing it, let alone vitrifying it.” Somehow I don’t think he has chemical fixation and plastination in mind, either. Ben Best? Well, Ben was becoming so agitated and overwrought communicating with me that, as an act of mercy, I decided to spare him further anguish – that ws at least a year or two ago.
People sometimes ask me why I don’t ban you from commenting here. I probably should, and I damn well would if I were in the cult business. But the fact is that while you can be incredibly irritatinga and obtuse, you do ask questions that no one else would either think to, or have the bollocks to So, now its my turn to ask you a few questions. Can you PLEASE tell me how to create a cult? I urgently need to know how to get this next crop of “bright young men” to do my bidding, or at least not to fuck it all up beyond perdition. How do I do that? Should I get a signet ring for the acolytes to kiss? What about dark and terrifying rituals of bondage and humilation, like Skull & Bones practice? Or maybe I should go the route I hear so many campus fraternities are now pursuing: they force pledges to engage in degrading homosexual behavior just for laughs and giggles; it’s safe, nonviolent, and I suppose, politically correct these days. The trouble with that last one is that I happen to like good sex, and I can’t imagine competence, let alone excellence and enthusiasm under such circumstances.
So, what exactly should I do, because truth to tell, now that I am solidly in my declining years, I certainly cannot tolerate another round of snotty and ungrateful acolytes and proteges; not only do they refuse to do my bidding, they won’t even talk to me. So please, tell me Dear Abby, what is a person in my situation to do??????
Sincerely,
A grateful reader in Yucca Valley, CA
> I would love to know what my “time on page” stats are, but as far as I can tell, my stat plugin does not have that function. Maybe I am just missing it?
I have no idea. Google Analytics seems to be one of the best free solutions around. Googling, I didn’t find any mention of time on site/page for WordPress blogs, although I did find that there apparently is a plugin to insinuate Google Analytics into all pages: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analyticator/
> In fact, if anything, I’m the best critic of cryonics there is. LessWrong has this thread about arguments against cryonics:http://lesswrong.com/lw/1r0/a_survey_of_anticryonics_writing/ which I find intensely amusing because so far, no one there has cottoned onto any of the really good ones. Hint: I just posted one over the last two days here.
Your criticisms are certainly interesting and seem thorough, but I think you misunderstand the point of that page. It’s pretty specific about the question: is cryonics possible *in principle*? Is the mind meaningfully preserved in the absence of electrical activity? Are there consequences of death that immediately cause information-theoretic death? (the old rupturing lysosomes being an example consequence)
Notice the Feynman example – the general isn’t asking for something that turns out to be infeasible because the processes are too tricky to get reliable or because the organization has such a high rate of failing in a few decades, he’s asking for something infeasible *in principle*. Hence also the first anti-cryonics piece examined, that the freezing process intrinsically destroys cells, or the author’s parenthetical aside about the anti-cryonics pieces that “they all talk about the cost and a varie Interestingly (and somewhat to the author’s surprise) there are no published technical articles on cryonics that claim it won’t work.ty of other issues, but here I’m focussing specifically on the issue of technical plausibility” or the approving quote of Merkle, “Interestingly (and somewhat to the author’s surprise) there are no published technical articles on cryonics that claim it won’t work.”
So, I don’t think your arguments are what ciphergoth was looking for. If you thought cryonics didn’t work even in principle, like a perpetual motion machine, it’d be almost beside the point to discuss other issues. (Your alluded to arguments would be those cost and other issues.)
MIKE WROTE:
“ Can you PLEASE tell me how to create a cult? ”
Well, I am certainly no expert, but saying something to the effect that “I am looking for a few good men, etc, willing to sacrifice and work hard etc” and then expressing a lot of moral absolutism etc, well, that sort of talk might well be attributed to someone wanting to start a cult.
BTW, my “cult” remark was meant to be humorous. Hence, the “tee hee”.
I think maybe you should consider taking up drinking a beer or two or smoking a joint to calm down. No offense intended.
mike wrote:
“I urgently need to know how to get this next crop of “bright young men” to do my bidding, or at least not to fuck it all up beyond perdition. How do I do that? ”
Either get lucky or have billions or….piggyback on a major societal/cultural institution.
mike wrote:
“What about dark and terrifying rituals of bondage and humilation, ”
Stop with the dirty talk. I am not homosexual.
/tee hee!
mike wrote:
“So, what exactly should I do, because truth to tell, now that I am solidly in my declining years, I certainly cannot tolerate another round of snotty and ungrateful acolytes and proteges; not only do they refuse to do my bidding, they won’t even talk to me. So please, tell me Dear Abby, what is a person in my situation to do??????”
That bit about the beer and the joint? I was not joking. Just relax a bit and enjoy life…
We all appreciate the sacrifices you made to build cryonics into what it is today. And I think you paid a price for those sacrifices. Remember that part about you wanting people who had not been “harmed by life”? Physician, heal thyself.
Maybe it is now time to settle into a role as an elder statesman of cryonics?
Yeah, that’s the problem with humor and the web. Our ancestors were (mostly) very careful to explicitly label humor as humor in written letters. Too bad we haven’t figured it out yet. My response was meant to be humorous; although I wasn’t sure your comments were ;-).
Umm, I didn’t think you were gay, so maybe you can explain this to me. I’m sitting in (of all places) a straight bar frequented by expats in this grungy little town in the middle of nowhere in Mexico, some months ago. I end up talking to this (straight) cultural anthropologist from NYC, who is writing a book on ritualistic homosexual behavior in heterosexual men. I laughed when he told me that and said, “Yeah, they’re straight alright; straight to the next man.” He didn’t think that was funny. He then proceeded to launch into this long dissertation about all these overtly homosexual or homoerotic rituals that groups of primarily alpha straight men engage in. He tells me about this completely unbelievable ritual that supposedly all US Navy ships engage in when they cross the equator. Newbies who haven’t been across before have to dress as women and are subjected to mock intercourse and mock fellatio (and sometimes not so mock). Turns out this has been going on forever, has some kind of special name, but nobody outside of the navy knows about it.
He told me that the elite fraternities, like Skull & Bones, have these rituals of bondage, simulated death and death resurrection, and require servile homoerotic behavior from the pledges. He tells me that recently in the US there has been a big increase in coerced fellatio and receptive anal intercourse in fraternities – possible in response to proscriptions on beatings and excessive alcohol ingestion. It just went downhill from there… I had no idea! Apparently the use of extreme stressors, and in particular the use of restraints, blindfolds and real or mock violence is an almost uniform initiation right into straight male social institutions. Since I have never participated in any of these institutions, and since I’m not into BDSM, this was news to me! I gather his hypothesis is that this behavior is part of the (sexual) and social dominance mechanism in men (straight or gay) and that it is expressed sexually because hierarchical and dominance/submission behavior is part of the brain’s sexual apparatus?
I find it hard to believe that I haven’t heard of this before. For instance, Fred Chamberlain was on aircraft carriers and other ships. But, you never know… as the British say, it’s funny old world. – Mike Darwin
yeah, when I crossed the equator in the indian ocean aboard the uss kitty hawk, they had the shellback initiation ceremonies. The initiates had to walk through a gauntlet on the flight deck, while the old hands showered them with blows from a shillelagh or threw garbage on them. I stayed out of it. Not much of a social bonder, myself. On the submarine I was on, the shellback ceremonies were somewhat more ….atavistic. One shellback gloated about how he was going to squirt lube grease up the rectum of the initiates. Hmmm…..I think he was kidding….
Yes, that was it, the “shellback” ritual. — Mike Darwin
@Mike:
I haven’t tried to get “in.” But on the other hand, I may have the actuarial tables working in my favor, assuming I have enough health and cognitive reserve left to do something useful for cryonics in the next couple of decades. Those older cryonicists, especially the ones in leadership positions, might want to treat me with more respect and start to groom me for the Apostolic Succession, because I have about as good a claim to it as any other long-time cryonicist, and I probably have better judgment than some of them I could name. They’ll need people to look out for their interests after they go into suspension, and unless we start to get a lot of capable newcomers,they don’t have that many choices. I, in turn, would try to groom younger cryonicists to assume the Apostolic Succession when my turn comes.
Yet they expect people in Future World to care enough about our historical existence to want to try to revive us.
This has always been a problem for me. I have never expected that the Future World people are going to care about reanimating us. Rather, I have always thought that it will be the future members of the cryonics organizations themselves who will do the reanimation. People outside the cryonics milieu are not going to care one iota about us one way or another when the reanimation technology becomes available. Why do I know this? Because they have no interest in signing up for cryonics themselves. Why are the future equivalents of such people going to bother to reanimate us?
The role of the cryonics organizations is not limited to doing suspensions and to maintain them. Its to ultimately develop the reanimation technology and bring everyone back themselves. The reanimation technology will be an adaptation of the regeneration technology that will be commonly used to rejuvenate people and to repair them from accidents, say, in 2150. It will be our job to take this off-the-shelf technology and use it to develop reanimation of cryonics members.
Also, where we do the reanimations may not necessarily be in Arizona or Indiana. It could be in Shanghai or Singapore, or even in a space colony out in the belt. Right now, the West is the leader of technological innovation and economic dynamism. However, there is no guarantee that this will be the case in 2150. By then, the West could be in a cultural stupor (like the Muslim Middle-east today) and the center of dynamism may be East Asia (led by China) or some other place. Or it could be in the belt.
I don’t think most of the people running the organizations understand these realities.
What I liked about Donaldson, and out host has some of this as well, is that he had the “deep”perspective. Most people in the technology and life-extension milieu have the “wide” perspective with no depth.
Advanced civilization could even shift more to the Southern Hemisphere, for a variety of reasons: a nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere (minus the On the Beach consequences), a new ice age, a gamma ray burst from a star in the northern sky, or just from an unforeseeable conjunction of events. We might resuscitate in a place like Buenos Aires, Adelaide or Johannesburg.
Well, Mike, you already know two successful cryonics-related cults to seek advice from. Why not ask the Venturists, or Terasem?
Now think about that advice, Mark. Because if you do you’ll realize that in both cases the answer is the same: Both organizations are the creatures of people who have some degree of personal wealth. Neither organization exhibits dynamicity, intellectual creativity, or, likely, much loyalty. One of the things I admired so much about Saul Kent sub 1is that he didn’t go that route. In the 20+ years we worked together he never tried to use his money or the money whose disposition he controlled, to push people around. He wanted (and he got) people who could think and act on their own and who were free to disagree with him. I can’t begin to tell you how extraordinary a thing that is. I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time because I had known him since I was 13 years old.
I am an absolute peach of a person compared to L. Ron Hubbard, A. J. Galambos, David Koresh or Jim Jones. These people were horrible. I actually knew two of them (I’m not telling). These guys earned their cults the old fashioned way: they MADE them. First, they had to get the point where they had control of either money or its equivalents – and that is hard to do. Then they had to use those resources to create a strangling ideological environment as that parcels out rewards and punishments solely to further own AND the leader’s interests. That is even harder….
The other cults remind me a lot of what I saw when I went to the parties and salons of the rich and sometimes also famous in Brentwood and Bel Air under the aegis of FM2030 and Tim Leary, many years ago. I’ve seen the same thing many times since with drug lords, gang bangers, the rich, the super rich and the famous. They are surrounded by people who have exactly the same feel as that given off in meetings in of the kinds of groups you mention (I’ve not been to as Terasem meeting). They also often (but not always) create a kind of creepy enthusiasm that is exactly like that of someone in the thrall of multilevel marketing – like Mary Kay or AmWay. These cohorts of acolytes last only as long as the coke, the crack, the parties, the retreats, the free food, the vacation lodging, or whatever other stream of goodies lasts. An old cryonics buddy of mine in the UK bitterly remarked that the only reason many peole came to meetings at one the groupd there because of the “dole” provided by the group’s leader. I told him I thought he was being too harsh. A couple months later I was at one of those meetings and sitting in a restaurant (tab paid by the group’s leader) and I was talking with the people at my table. I asked what brought them to the meeting and several immediately answered, “It’s cold in our flat and we hardly ever get to eat out in a place like this.”
No thanks.
I am searching for people who are not just willing, but who are anxious to march into hell, and back, because of the certainty and the morality of the values they reasonably hold. I was surrounded by men (and one woman) like that once in my life. They were by no means superheroes; nor were they pictures of what is conventionally called courage. Still, they were my betters, and I learned a great deal from them at a terrible personal cost.
What was their use and why were they so unique? Because they made it inescapably clear that cryonics could work, and that if it didn’t work in the face of such courage and resolve, then the world was not merely a place not worth living in, it was a place it would not be possible to live in. THAT is fundamentally all cryonics needs.
– Mike Darwin