[ExI] [ZS] [cryo] Nick Bostrom, Anders Sandberg, Stuart Armstrong to be frozen after death

[Keith Henson]

On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 5:00 AM,  Florent Berthet
<florent.berthet at gmail.com> wrote:

snip

> I'm not pointing fingers here, I want to know why several x-risk
> researchers made the decision to allocate a non-negligible amount of money
> on their cryopreservation. I highly respect these guys and it is their job
> to think about the most important things in the world, so most likely I'm
> missing something, I just want to know what. There are two possibilities:
>
> - they did this to send a message to the public and to fuel research, in
> which case it may be a smart move.
> - they did for selfish reasons, in which case I wouldn't consider it
> reasonable given the amounts involved.

There are more than two possibilities.  Another one is that a person
who is signed up for cryonics may think longer term than someone who
is not.

> I don't expect anybody to be perfect all the time - I'm certainly not - but
>  spending ?50,000 for selfish reasons is highly debatable, to say the
> least, especially coming from people whose job is to raise awareness on
> important issues (one issue being the underfunding of high-impact science).

As Anders mentioned, the payment is from life insurance and as he
says, it's less than the cost of a dinner out a week.

You are, incidentally, condemning a fair fraction of the people who
post on this list.  Max More is president of Alcor, and historically
many of the people here have been signed up.  I have been signed up
since 1985 and have participated in 20 of the 100 plus suspensions
Alcor has done.

Keith Henson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Henson