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"Unresearched suspicions regarding the ethics and business practices of cryonics organizations."
I consider this to be a real issue. There just isn't much transparency among the handful of players, and sentiments like yours aren't making them any less opaque.
A few comments that might not be too popular.
It occurs to me that people with an impaired social awareness and capabilities are less likely to be aware of their impairment, much like the Anosognosic’s Dilemma. As the Wired survey is a self-diagnosis, I would not place too much confidence in its scores, at least as conventionally interpreted. High scores might suggest a high degree of self-awareness that there is a problem (which is good!)
I also wonder if 'AS' is some innate and unchangeable characteristic of a person, beyond his ability to control, or if it is more like a learned behavior shaped by experience. This whole 'diagnosis' mentality suggests AS is a medical condition, but if it is not, then we are not helping those who might be able to change, and instead encouraging them to see it as a natural and permanent characteristic of themselves.
I love LW - its one of my favorite reads, though I don't quite fully appreciate some of the more advanced rationality posts yet. Thank you all for making a great community.
So who is this "Zheng Kuifei (郑奎飞), President of the Beijing Yong Sheng Academy" from the cryonics.org archives?
One investigative article from the Chinese media is not too flattering. (http://paper.people.com.cn/hqrw/html/2006-11/16/content_12065967.htm) Quite a colorful character - claims to be 'secretly engaged' to a famous actress. Right... His interview is also interesting (http://www.people.com.cn/GB/paper447/16692/1469113.html). Google translate should get you the gist of it. He's filed for lots of singularity-relevant patents too. (http://www.ipexl.com/directory/en/APPLICANT_Zheng_Kuifei.html)
As far as I can tell, this so-called Beijing Yong Sheng Academy or Beijing Immortality-Era Economic Research Institute (北京永生时代经济研究院) does not exist either.
The saddest thing about all this is that this guy's antics have probably poisoned the water for cryonics in China.
Chinese cryonics? There are rumors, but nothing concrete. http://www.cryonics.org/immortalist/january05/letters.htm
There are better results searching for "人体冷冻法 ", "人体冷冻学" or "人体冷冻技术": An article about Alcor ("ah-er-ke") http://news.xinhuanet.com/world/2005-12/13/content_3913137.htm
On a related note, prospects for AGI research in China: http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/ai/chinese-singularity
Someone with working knowledge of hiragana/katakana might try the same for Japanese cryonics?
Does anyone know what the progress is like on the Australian facility? The article about Rhoades is four years old and there's nothing on the CAA site about it.
Google Trends suggests that the region has a lot of latent interest. Check out the top search origins. http://www.google.com/trends?q=cryonics
FYI Here are Rhoades' cryonet messages. http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/findmsgs.cgi?author=philip%20rhoades