Charitable Cryonics

Alcor is already a charity, funded by people who wish to see cryonics spread - Alcor runs at an annual loss of hundreds of thousands, made up by donations and other such charitable generosity. As it happens, they also choose to spend their extremely limited cryonics slots on their most generous donors; what's the problem?

Alcor is indeed a charity, both formally in the legal sense and in the sense that everyone in the Alcor community donates their time, money, resources, their names, and anything else that will help Alcor grow and prosper. The Board all donate their time, and often much more. The staff put in long hours for modest wages. And we have countless volunteers and part-time contributors and contractors who make an immense contribution. We also have contractual relationships with other companies, who are also dedicated to the same cause.

This is because we believe in what we're doing.

Our thanks to the Less Wrong community. The monthly Board meetings review new applicants and the reasons they give for joining Alcor. Less Wrong is mentioned more and more often these days, keep up the good work!

Ralph C. Merkle, Alcor Board member

An informational balance where one side presents no argument, and the other side presents an argument with a pre-written bottom line.

Suppose that the former "side" also presents its "bottom line". Now you have two contradictory "bottom lines", by assumption statements disconnected from the fact they purport to elicit. What next? They are, by assumption, equally useless. If every question of truth has two "sides" that represent perfect rationalizations for the two alternative answers, how can anything be known?

The $200,000 price tag is only for whole body cases. The actual minimum is $80,000 for head-only. Neuro is actually better from an information-theoretic standpoint because the cooling rate is faster, which reduces warm ischemic time. It also makes the patient easier to move in an emergency, incurs lower long term storage/cooling costs, and uses less cryoprotectant solution.

I like the idea of a charity that a) strongly signals that it is charitable and b) has the effect of signing lots of people up who wouldn't otherwise become involved. Charitable fundraising for cases which could not get life insurance (e.g. James Swayze or Bill O'Rights) has precedence, but I'm not aware of an organization that actively fundraises for "merit scholarships" like this. I do know of an organization that provides some third party information, the Institute for Evidence Based Cryonics.

I'm really not sure why you feel the need to have a charity to research this - a simple non-profit research organisation could probably rather trivially fund a review of cryonics literature. Alcor and CI both do a great job of citing their sources, and LessWrong has done a review of the anti-cryonics literature (short version: there isn't any that has an actual basis in science)

Really what it comes down to is, cryonics says "given the current proven technologies, these few assumptions, and an assumed high-likelihood that we'll therefore also develop X and Y at some point, we can do this." There isn't any way to research or test that short of actually developing a de-vitrification process and proving it works. If you're curious to know whether cryonics really works, you'd have to fund the organisations doing that research.

(Let's pick p = 0.05)

Let's not.