http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2022304/Jane-Fonda-73-displays-age-defying-figure-sheer-dress.html

The negative response evoking words were dead, death and snake. My suspicion is that “freezing” doesn’t exactly make people feel all warm and fuzzy, either. So, as soon as you utter the words “freezing dead people” you have evoked a visceral and strongly negative reaction. If you have ever been in a conversation with someone who is also halfway listening on the phone and they are suddenly told by the caller that their kid was just hit and killed by a car, or that that their house just burned down, well, a mini-version of that is pretty much what happens when you say you freeze dead people. You just shot yourself in the foot and they will have instantly “turned off and tuned you out.” Those words are not only repulsive to many people, they don’t make sense to them and they evoke images of meat in the freezer – something you do to dead things you are going to eat. It’s awful.

In the 1970s the acute reaction was just terrible. I was at a party in a young architect’s swanky home on Twin Peaks, in SF in 1979, and he asked me what I was doing in SF. I told him: “Well, I freeze dead people and I just finished two back-to-back cases in LA and, since I was out here in California, well no way was I going to miss seeing San Francisco.” He excused himself immediately and went to the loo. He didn’t come back. Turns out, my remarks made him nauseated and he went to the loo and passed out. Since he was (unbeknownst to me) also a diabetic, his friends thought he might be in a diabetic coma. There was a huge to-do, and when it emerged that it was ME who was responsible, well, let’s just say the rest of the evening was very strained, and needless to say, the subject of cryonics did not come up again.

We can’t let their language derail us; no way, no how. What’s more, we are doing a public service to medicine and the community at large by educating people on the non-binary, “gray” nature of death. Critical care medicine is confronting this problem in a huge way, and what’s more, a lot of people are clued in to that fact. Are people in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) dead, or alive, or somewhere in between? Is it OK to take organs from a person whose heart has stopped (“irreversibly’) but who is not “brain dead”? People need to come to grips with these gray-state issues, because completely apart from cryonics, they are going to increasingly confront them in medicine and in the law.

And it is not hard to communicate action in the face of uncertainty – it’s easy to do by way of analogy. If someone buys a stock they are making a (hopefully) informed bet that it is going to increase in value. Until it does or doesn’t, nobody knows if their course of action was profitable, or not. HOWEVER, if that same person is buying a diversified portfolio of shares, then even if he loses on some stocks, it is possible to say that he is behaving rationally, prudently and in just about the only way you can if you want a high probability of return on your investment with a minimum of risk.

How bad do you want to get rich and what are your circumstances? If your biggest dream in life is to be a millionaire and you have an IQ of 80, and some days you find it confusing to tie your shoes, then the only way you can reasonably expect to be a millionaire is to buy a lottery ticket at least once in your lifetime. That’s not irrational, it is perfectly sane and reasonable, given that you REALLY want to be rich and you REALLY aren’t going to get that way by investing, or by hard work. We’re in the same position. Don’t try to “sell” cryonics to people. Instead, tell them the truth and let them make an informed decision. The best way to do that, at least for me, is to explain why and how much I love being alive and that from my perspective, dying destroys the most important thing to me, and it also will destroy the next most important things to me: my friends, my family, my culture and my civilization. THAT’S what makes cryonics worth pursuing and rational. Once you get that far, you can point out that the crappy odds are not set in stone. They can change based on the actions of individuals. No Wright Brothers = no flight for awhile longer, anyway. No Edison = no phonograph; and there was no phonograph for a long, long time, even though it is an easy bit of technology. WE CAN CHANGE THE ODDS. Yes, they are shitty right now. Yes, we may well not make it. However, we would be cowards and losers not to try, given how much we value our lives. If they don’t feel that way, well, that’s their loss.

So, yes, language matters. Please, use the proper words. — Mike Darwin

Finally, the articles dealing with sex will use common, everyday language. Fuck is a perfectly acceptable word on the BBC after 2100 hours, and I intent to use it and other words like it – to pretty much the same standard as the British do in their HIV education materials:http://www.gmfa.org.uk/londonservices/booklets-and-postcards/pdfs/semen-sex-hiv.pdf, http://www.tht.org.uk/informationresources/publications/gaymengerneralinformation/bottomlinethe124.pdf. Semen Sex and HIV, the booklet at the first URL is produced by the Camden National Health Service. Imagine something like that being published by the US NIH!!?? — Mike Darwin

“At times I wonder if it is better to concede that that sun moves around the earth, while defending the notion that there is always the possibility that the earth revolves around the sun. Some people get resentful when you try to change their view of the cosmos. If they don’t have telescopes and cannot look and see for themselves, or they cannot do the calculations that show that the wandering stars must indeed move around the sun, then they will become angry. The notion that the earth revolves around the sun is about as weird and foreign as was the notion that the earth is a sphere, and not a plane.”

The obvious conclusion to me is that force should be used to coerce everybody into taking database classes until they get it, but there may still be a flaw in my reasoning. :)