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VV:

I'm wondering if fixing the tissue with strong crosslinking fixative and storing in a jar is better idea... if I know that the information is very likely in forms of proteins and their placement, but I do not know their solubility, for purposes of preserving information, I'd rather cross-link the hell out of it and put it in a jar than perfuse with solvents and then freeze. Dipping a book in solvent may keep the book easy to open, but dipping the book in fixative is better if you want to, you know, not wash off the ink.

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 @google-8a859b151b507f070cefe46a035c0a99:disqus  If cryo companies were seriously interested in research, they could certainly find various ways to do it.

Consider a cryopreservation lottery, for instance: Cryopreserve a body or head charging half the price, then an independent and trusted party tosses a coin. If head comes up, the "patient" is kept intact, if tails comes up, it is dissected for research.

Given that the probability of cryonics success is so small, and there is so much uncertainty on it that even the order of magnitude is difficult to estimate, halving it won't significantly affect any expected value estimation that you may be doing, and the reduced price would open it to people who wouldn't be able to afford it at full price.

But of course real-life cryonics would recoil in horror at the thought of their precious brains and bodies being dissected, experimented with and finally discarded in the waste bin, even though if no research is done they may be well doomed anyway, even if their ice graves are kept intact until the end of time. But cryonics is not about rationally increasing your lifespan. It's the transhumanist equivalent of a religious burial ritual.

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 @gwern0:disqus

More's with CI, not ALCOR

No. http://en.wikipedia.org/wik..."At the start of 2011, Max More became president and CEO of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation"

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This minority still outnumbers cryonicists by a huge factor. If cryonics companies don't have funds for research they should raise the prices by few tens percent, especially on full body. Research is not that expensive if you are into it, a lot of labs do amazing things on rather small budget.

Taxes work to get us to the moon; libertarianism doesn't work enough to freeze a few cow heads under oversight, or so it seems.

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 Involuntarily, though! One thinks of the polls taken during the Apollo program showing only a minority of the American populace in favor (although pretty much everyone had to pay taxes).

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> no one regards better research as more of a priority than their own skins

There's probably orders of magnitude more people contributing to better research than people signed up for cryonics, actually...

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People are willing to donate for supporting existing cryopreservations or with an eye to their own cryopreservation, no one regards better research as more of a priority than their own skins. I'm not sure this is wrong, but feel free to donate to the Brain Preservation Prize, which is targeted at exactly this problem. (I already have.)

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I remember I was very surprised when I read it, though. It wasn't this comment, it was something else. In any case, they seem to do surprisingly little experimental testing. Anyone serious would consider research a basic necessity, include it into price, and have tens cryo-preserved animal brains of different species, and wouldn't have the issue of, quoting Hanson, "The people who developed the anti-freeze published some 2D pictures that look good, but we don’t know how selectively these were chosen, or how much worse is the typical cryonics freezing process. ".

edit: In any case, I think plastination may have very good scientific support quite soon.

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 More's with CI, not ALCOR, and it sounds like an offhand estimate. I don't know what sort of dewars CI uses, but they could have some similar cross-subsidy which he is not factoring in.

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this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/bk6...

seems to agree with me, but I originally heard that somewhere else. They should price the whole body very high to cover the costs for scientific experiments. The prices look high enough to be able to afford to do some very good science if you are into it, from the margin on just few deals. A lot of experiments with animal heads, not just some 2d images with no ice from 1 rabbit head. Or ask one of very rich clients for funding scientific aspect of it.

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I got an e-mail from Robin informing me that one should never have four comments visible under "Recent Comments."

Have other frequent contributors gotten similar notices? Perhaps I'm an extreme case, which I'd be glad to take account of, but the rule seems, to put it bluntly, self-aggrandizing and antirational. You can't hope to have discussion with rational give-and-take when continuing a discussion is made a cost.

The impression it gives, which I don't know the accuracy of, is that Robin is determined that the OP always remain the center of the discussion. What purpose does such a rule serve; most blogs thrive on more discussion.

What gives with this silliness?

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 > Sounds to me that you don't understand your terrorism article, if you don't see how "unclassy" it is. Self-knowledge: the ultrascarce resource among LWers.I'm sorry, was there supposed to be an argument in there? Are you sure you know what the points of the essays were? Is this the same way you were "sure" that Eliezer is paid $140k a year by SI?

> Everyone got it but gwern(0), who obviously can't get over it.

Er, what? No one got it. There was no humor in it. You were apparently sufficiently ashamed of your claim to delete it entirely. Fortunately, I am used to such shenanigans and had quoted it in my reply: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ct8... I invite anyone to read it and the other quoted parts, and srdiamond's comments here, and see for themselves whether srdiamond's description of the matter is remotely accurate.

> 2. I never asserted that E.Y. is a psychopath. I entertained it and firmly rejected the possibility.

Wow. Good job. BTW, I've entertained the possibility you enjoy raping small animals, but don't worry! I've firmly rejected the possibility for lack of evidence.

(Also, that comment was directed more at dymtry, who continues to 'entertain' the possibility.)

> 3. Nobody has denied that rightist billionaire Peter Thiel is absolutely critical financially for the survival of the Singularity Institute.

No one has, that's true. He provides somewhere under half the funding - as I've pointed out myself.

However, how important is that? I don't know of any connection between Thiel's funding and LW or Eliezer posting on LW. And as far as I know, Thiel has minimal influence on LW content and SI itself; I've never seen an article taken down apparently because of Thiel, even as LWers mock cherished beliefs of Thiel's like Christianity, and he's never come up in any of my assignments in the past (much less in a censorious role). So I can't say I particularly care about that observation. Thiel funds a lot of things, and SI seems to be one of them.

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Sounds to me like someone doesn't understand my terrorism essays if they think they're 'advice'.

Sounds to me that you don't understand your terrorism article, if you don't see how "unclassy" it is. Self-knowledge: the ultrascarce resource among LWers.

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A few points for clarity; gwern(0) has one skill: obfuscation.

1. I made a joke once on LW about the Singularity Institute being a device to promote homeschooling. (You know, given that they're all dropouts.) Everyone got it but gwern(0), who obviously can't get over it.

2. I never asserted that E.Y. is a psychopath. I entertained it and firmly rejected the possibility.

3. Nobody has denied that rightist billionaire Peter Thiel is absolutely critical financially for the survival of the Singularity Institute. Nor has anyone challenged the truism that control of the purse strings equals power to control the agenda. Couple this with the obvious fact that LW is an EY fan club, that two-years worth of salary were poured into LW by Thiel by "seeding" it with lengthy daily postings from E.Y.--that writing the Sequences to put LW on the map was the Singularity Institute's project, funded by Thiel.

Then, unless you're very naïve about the role of rightist billionaires in U.S. intellectual and political life, you won't be complacent about one having financial control over a public figure made so by that same reactionary billionaire. 

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Sounds to me like someone doesn't understand my terrorism essays if they think they're 'advice'.

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You'll arrive one day, gwern(0). Your identity is so well camouflaged that nobody knows who you are. By the way, your advice to terrorists on your blog sure was "classy." You don't know what the word means.

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