CryoNet #32974 - #32976

CryoNet - Sun 24 Oct 2010

    #32974: Re: Eugen Leitl on "Future Squatters" [David Stodolsky]
    #32975: A feature that won't appear in Cryonics magazine-1 [Charles in Arizona]
    #32976: A feature that won't appear in Cryonics magazine-2 [Charles in Arizona]

Rate This Digest: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=32974%2D32976

Administrivia

To subscribe to CryoNet, send email to:
    [email protected]
with the subject line (not message _body_):
    subscribe
To unsubscribe, use the subject line:
    unsubscribe
To post a message to CryoNet, send your message to:
    [email protected]
from the same address to which you are aubscribed.
Send questions, comments, or feedback to [email protected]
with "CryoNet" or "cryonics" somewhere in the Subject line.


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message #32974
Subject: Re: Eugen Leitl on "Future Squatters"
From: David Stodolsky <[email protected]>
Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2010 12:51:03 +0200
References: <[email protected]>

On 23 Oct 2010, at 11:00 AM, CryoNet wrote:

> CRYONICS: Understanding Why It Failed
> 
> http://transvision2010.wordpress.com/2010/08/19/transvision-2010-presentation-by-eugen-leitl/

> Thus, the core problem in cryonics is the absence of a philosophical and moral basis for cryonics and the accompanying ethics and dogma required to enforce it.

This overlooks cosmism, which does provide a basis for cryonics:

http://sites.google.com/a/cosmism.info/cosmism/what-is-cosmism


Unfortunately, some work on cosmism by transhumanists have distorted the meaning of that worldview. 


dss


David Stodolsky
[email protected]  Skype: davidstodolsky

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=32974

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message #32975
Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2010 20:55:47 -0700
Subject: A feature that won't appear in Cryonics magazine-1
From: Charles in Arizona <[email protected]>

Preamble and Explanation

I started writing for _Cryonics_ magazine in 1992, and have continued
intermittently since then, even after I ceased to be an Alcor member.
My most recent piece, published in the magazine dated 4th Quarter
2009, speculated that "growth advocates" such as Ray Kurzweil may lack
sufficient evidence to support their predictions. I wondered whether
some of Kurzweil's exponential curves may eventually turn out to be
S-shaped, which would significantly delay the development of molecular
nanotechnology.

After the article was published, I heard that one Alcor director was
very unhappy about it. A supervisory editorial board was created,
consisting of himself and another person. The board was subsequently
expanded to four people, and when the editor notified them that he had
accepted a new article of mine a few weeks ago, the board reviewed it.

They requested changes, which I was reluctant to make. The supervisory
board then declined to approve publication of my text.

This was my first rejection from _Cryonics_ in 18 years, and came as a
surprise, because I didn't think that what I had written was
especially controversial. My article examined cryonics history, made
some general inferences about a persistent tendency toward excessive
optimism, and suggested that this has had financial consequences.

Of course a writer is not necessarily the best person to judge his own
work, but you can decide for yourself whether my description of it is
fair. The text appears below, edited slightly to clarify a couple of
points and remove references to my previous feature for _Cryonics_
magazine, which CryoNet subscribers may not have read.

Note that although the editorial board reviewed my text, they did not
offer any feedback regarding accuracy. I have done my best in this
respect, but the text has not been subjected to the kind of fact
checking that would normally occur before print publication. I welcome
any corrections from people at Alcor who have access to information
that is unavailable to me.

================

Cryoptimism

by Charles Platt

================

PART ONE

================

1: Why Optimism Matters

At the risk of stating the obvious, optimism has enabled the most
important social and technical advances throughout history. From
inventors such as Nikolai Tesla or Robert Goddard, to those most
venerable optimists who wrote the Declaration of Independence (when
realists might have said, "Forget about it, you don't have a chance"),
we owe many of our freedoms and comforts to people who refused to
accept compromise or defeat. So--of course I see the need for
optimism.

However, every trait has a down side, and our goal should be to
recognize that down side, and minimize it, while benefiting from the
up side. This is especially relevant in cryonics, because cryonicists
generally tend to be a very optimistic bunch, highly motivated to
defend their outlook, since lives are at stake. In fact their
determination to achieve and defend their goal results in optimism
that I think is so intense, I'm going to call it cryoptimism, which I
might define as rampant optimism flavored with a dose of hubris and a
dash of megalomania, sustained by fear of oblivion.

I don't think this is much of an exaggeration. Just look at the list
of concepts which almost every cryonicist accepts without much
thought:

     We believe, or hope, that we will die in such a way that
     immediate stabilization will be possible, even though
     only about one case in three conforms with this model.
     We trust our relatives not to interfere with our plans,
     even though there are countless examples where relatives
     have attempted, in some cases successfully, to withhold
     news of death, prevent cryopreservation, or seize the
     funding. If regulators, legislators, judges, police,
     hospital administrators, coroners, or other people in
     positions of authority try to prevent us from getting
     what we want, we believe we should be able to stop them.

     We assume that our organization will endure for decades,
     or even centuries, while maintaining us in stasis,
     regardless of natural disasters, possible periods of
     inflation, possible system failures, legal problems,
     legislative problems, regulatory problems, floods,
     fires, weather disturbances, terrorist acts, and other
     hazards.

     We expect scientists (or intelligent machines) to repair
     brain damage that may have been devastating on a
     cellular level, after which we will be revived and
     rejuvenated in a world that will welcome us, even though
     the amount that we have specifically set aside for
     repair and revival is, in many instances, zero.

I am fully aware of the arguments in favor of these assumptions.
Indeed my own relatively mild condition of cryoptimism encourages me
to accept them and give cryonics a try, especially since the
alternative is certain destruction. We should be aware, however, that
most people in the world would see this list as delusional. Indeed,
this may be the real answer to the perennial question, "Why don't more
people sign up for cryonics?" They don't sign up because they're too
skeptical--which is another way of saying that they are not optimistic
enough. Like it or not, we are at the far end of the bell curve where
optimism is concerned. (I still recall that when Robert Ettinger's
_The Prospect of Immortality_ was reviewed in _Science_ magazine, the
reviewer described him as "an utterly confused optimist.")

I find death infinitely depressing, so I'm happy to hang with a crowd
of hardcore rebels against mortality. The trouble is, like any
obsessional trait, cryoptimism can create tunnel vision. It refuses to
acknowledge barriers that may defeat its goal, and thus blinds people
to risks that should be obvious.

This is especially true when we deal with a perennial topic that
interferes with our ambitions. I am referring, of course, to money.

================

2: Money Should Not Be a Problem

As a technical journalist, I used to visit a lot of startups in
Silicon Valley, where I learned the importance of writing a business
plan. Typically the plan would include fundamentals such as the
proposed number of employees and their qualifications, the technical
challenges to be overcome, the probable rollout date, and the likely
revenue stream from customers buying the service or product. Most
essential of all, there would be projections of burn rate and the
probable time to reach break-even. These factors would be as important
for nonprofit organizations as for for-profits.

So far as I know, not a single cryonics organization has ever been
established along these lines.

In the early days, of course, it would have been impossible to find
conventional startup capital. There was some justification, back then,
for activists to pool their meager savings, round up some donations
and volunteer labor, and simply hope for the best. Still, unjustified
and unrealistic expectations remained the model for cryonics
organizations even in the 1990s, when CryoCare Foundation and its
service providers, BioPreservation and CryoSpan, were formed.

CryoCare was launched by a handful of unpaid volunteers with around
$10,000 in donations (maybe slightly less, because I seem to recall
that a couple of the checks bounced). BioPreservation did a great job
of itemizing its expenses to justify its billing, but its services
relied on the continuing availability of just one person, and I recall
that its facility was provided gratis by a benefactor. CryoSpan did
provide a short document predicting its own profitability, but
required that the number of cases should grow at many times the
highest rate ever recorded in cryonics history. This turned out to be
as unrealistic as any noncryoptimist would expect.

It seems to me that most cryonicists have been more concerned with
saving their lives than with fiscal responsibility. In fact, as I
spent time in cryonics organizations, I noticed something which I
would describe as the "Money Should Not Be a Problem" mindset. It went
more or less like this:

     We have enough cash to run our facility and do cases.
     That's the main thing.

     We'll do a lot of outreach and hope for some publicity--
     maybe from a famous case.

     If we do enough TV shows, we'll probably hook up with
     people who have real money. They will donate it or
     invest it, to save their own lives.

     While we're waiting for this to happen, we can always
     ask for help from our existing members (who will be
     motivated to make donations, because they want to save
     their lives too).

     Money should not be a problem, because cryonics is "too
     important to fail."

In recent years Alcor has made commendable efforts to put its
operations on a more fiscally prudent basis, and was always careful
about financing the future storage of patients. Nevertheless, as of
2010, the embarrassing fact remains that every cryonics organization
that ever existed has lost money. (The Cryonics Institute may object
to this statement, since I believe it enjoys a small surplus from each
case, but CI has hidden benefits such as a large building that was
paid for with a bequest, and only two paid employees, one of whom took
a massive salary cut when he accepted the job, and has stated publicly
that "I live like a monk." He would be difficult, if not impossible,
to replace.)

Alcor still depends on donations, and based on my conversations with
former employees, I think the belief that "Money Should Not Be a
Problem" may still lurk temptingly in the background--because money
always has turned up, somehow or other, year after year.

================

3: The Problem of Scalability

Suppose an organization has a strict rule that revenue from doing a
case can only be spent directly on that case, with the surplus going
into a Patient Care Trust. Now suppose that everyday costs of doing
business are not entirely covered by the other source of income, which
would be membership dues. You don't have to be an accountant to see
that the organization is taking a loss per member.

I suspect that this has been Alcor's situation for a very long time.
Traditionally, the answer has been "growth," but this brings to mind
the old joke about the salesperson in a New York camera store:

     CUstomer: "Moshe, how can you make a profit, selling a
     camera for $199 that costs you $201 wholesale?"

     Moshe (waving his arms for emphasis): "Volume! Volume!"

In reality, if each new member can only be accepted at a loss, more
members will create a bigger loss, unless there are economies of
scale. A review of Alcor's running costs compared with its membership
numbers suggests that there aren't any such economies of scale--at
least, not yet. Therefore, the cryoptimist mantra that "growth is
always good" is not necessarily true.

This is no problem so long as the number of wealthy donors increases
at the same rate as (or, ideally, faster than) the number of members.
In reality, however, one source of money has outweighed all others:
Life Extension Foundation. Will LEF continue to increase its annual
support indefinitely? The idea seems implausible. Thus we run into the
unwelcome proposition that donation is not necessarily scalable, and
money may indeed be a problem, no matter how strongly we feel that it
shouldn't. I have not seen much discussion of this, perhaps because
cryoptimists generally prefer to think about goals rather than
problems, and the easiest way to get rid of a problem is by applying
one of two tactics: the Quick Fix, or Delayed Delegation.

[Continued in the next CryoNet message.]

================

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=32975

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message #32976
Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2010 20:56:30 -0700
Subject: A feature that won't appear in Cryonics magazine-2
From: Charles in Arizona <[email protected]>

Cryoptimism

by Charles Platt

================

PART TWO

================

4: The Quick Fix

The overwheming desire to reach a goal encourages a mood of
impatience, especially as each new day brings us all closer to death.
Impatience is not compatible with incremental, painstaking work. Thus
cryoptimists have always been impatient with conventional methods and
vulnerable to someone who turns up with a simple, quick solution to a
complicated problem. Examples have included Olga Visser, the
perfusionist who claimed to be able to do an end run around
cryobiological research, and Cells4Life, a company that was formed
with the sincere confidence that it would generate enough revenue to
support Alcor indefinitely. (Of course the most persistent Quick Fix
is the old idea that one high-profile case will legitimize cryonics
and open the flood gates to a wave of new members. One former Alcor
CEO told me he had believed that such a case would bring in 10,000
members within a matter of months, until actual experience proved
otherwise.)

So far as I know, there is not one single instance of a successful
Quick Fix in cryonics history, but the concept still exerts a powerful
attraction.

================

5: Delayed Delegation

Cryonics has benefited from many people who have done a lot of very
hard work, often for low pay, or no pay at all. These activists built
the original organizations, designed and built the equipment, ran the
cases, and did the research that legitimized the procedures in the
cases. We owe them a lot.

We have also benefited from brilliant people such as Eric Drexler,
Ralph Merkle, and Robert Freitas who have mapped out the possibilities
for cellular repair, greatly increasing the plausibility of cryonics.

Last but not least, we are indebted to the activists who stood up
against threats from entities such as the Riverside Coroner or a
representative of the Arizona legislature. These were instances where
cryoptimism paid huge dividends.

Alas, the activists are a minority which is growing smaller, and for
many people in cryonics, the general concept of delegating our
problems to people in the future has become a refuge from confronting
problems today. This is what I refer to as Delayed Delegation.

================

6: Life Insurance and Minimums

I now come to the specific example of underfunding, by which I mean
members whose funding was sufficient for the cryopreservation minimum
when they signed up orginally, but is no longer sufficient for the
minimum that is required today. Such people remain eligible for
cryopreservation at Alcor because they have been "grandfathered in."
Grandfathering has never been an official Alcor policy, but has always
been allowed as an unofficial policy.

How does this relate to the traits I've listed so far?

In the early days of cryonics, most activists didn't have much
money--certainly not enough for their indefinite cryopreservation.
How, then, could they achieve their overriding goal of defeating
death? Well, there was an obvious Quick Fix: Buy life insurance. And
since it satisfied the need that Money Should Not Be a Problem, the
concept was hard to resist.

Of course, people realized that since the cost of cryopreservation
would tend to increase with time, the insurance would lose value
relative to the service it was supposed to buy. But to a 25-year-old
activist grappling with everyday challenges associated with running a
small undercapitalized company, death must have seemed a remote
prospect, decades away. Before then, no doubt, some key event would
change the public perception of cryonics. The concept was so obvious,
it was--well, too important to fail! Members would come flooding in,
and no one would be worrying about money anymore.

In other words, the problem created by the Quick Fix of life insurance
should be solved by Delayed Delegation.

As Alcor started accepting more members, there was a conscience-driven
move to encourage the newcomers to buy more than the minimum life
insurance. "Twice the minimum" was sometimes suggested as a safe hedge
against inflation. Was this multiple based on a calculation of the
likely cost increase of procedures during the member's likely
lifetime? I don't think so. In fact, so far as I can tell, that
calculation was never performed until the 1990s, when an Alcor member
named Eric Klien did the math and started posting messages about it on
CryoNet. Klien showed beyond any doubt that doubling the minimum would
not be sufficient if (a) a member was likely to live for another 40 or
50 years and (b) the cost of cryopreservation was likely to grow by a
modest annual inflation rate.

No one could prove Klien wrong, but his message was not welcome, and
Alcor did not revise its policies. No one wanted to increase minimums
unduly, because this would discourage people from joining. No one
wanted to discard the unofficial policy of "grandfathering" members
because this might cause people to leave Alcor and go elsewhere.
Either of these eventualities would conflict with the sacrosanct
desire for growth. But the costs associated with cryopreservation went
up by around 3 to 4 percent per year, on average, and funding minimums
were periodically increased to cover these costs. Consequently, more
and more members became underfunded, especially when funding minimums
were increased substantially in 2005.

================

7: How Many?

According to the membership graph on the Alcor web site, about 400
people joined between 1995 and 2005. Financial planner Rudi Hoffman,
who arranged insurance funding for many prospective Alcor members
during that period, believes that most of those who opted for
neuropreservation obtained insurance policies for $100,000--that is,
double the minimum. Many of them had no choice, because the insurance
companies which Rudi dealt with started requiring $100,000 as the
minimum face value for any policy.

However, those who chose whole-body preservation were not forced to
pay more, and many chose not to. They obtained only minimum funding,
which was then $120,000. As for the neuro signups who didn't use
Rudi's services, I have no way of knowing how well they are funded,
but I suspect that many of them only provided minimum funding.

Therefore, I would guess that 50 to 100 of the 400 (approximate)
people who joined Alcor during the ten years commencing in 1995 became
underfunded when the minimums increased in 2005. As for the
approximately 350 members who signed before 1995--surely, most of them
never obtained more than double the minimums that prevailed when they
joined. If that is the case, they are now underfunded, too. (I regret
that I must guess at these numbers, because they are not public. If my
guesses are wrong, I encourage corrections.)

This is why I conclude that at least 250 of Alcor's current members
are now probably underfunded.

The members who are overfunded will help to compensate for those who
are underfunded, but I see two problems with this. First, I find it
ethically unacceptable that provident people should subsidize
improvident people. Second, even if the overfunding cancels out the
underfunding currently, it cannot be sufficient to compensate for it
for the indefinite future, as funding minimums will probably continue
to increase.

How big will the underfunding problem become? Projecting this number
would be simple enough, for anyone with access to Alcor data:

     1. Check each member's funding.

     2. Look up the probable life expectancy for each member
     from actuarial tables, and project Alcor's probable
     funding minimum at the likely time of death, assuming
     that minimums continue to increase by an average of 3 or
     4 percent per year. Subtract the member's grandfathered
     funding amount from the probable future minimum at the
     likely time of death, to find the member's probable
     funding gap (in a few cases, it could be a surplus).

     3. Add up all the funding gaps, subtract the total of
     surpluses, and the result would be Alcor's total
     probable unfunded liability for performing
     cryopreservations.

Unfortunately, so far as I know, no one has ever done this
calculation. Therefore, the likely future dimensions of the
underfunding problem remain unknown.

================

8: Our Own Contribution to the Problem

It's easy to blame Alcor directors for one thing or another; people do
it all the time. In this instance, though, I think we must also blame
ourselves.

When I signed up, so far as I remember, the neuropreservation minimum
was $35,000 and the annual membership dues were $199. I obtained whole
life insurance for around $500 per year, and thus for less than $2 per
day I enjoyed the smug illusion that I had solved the annoying little
problem of human mortality. Just like that.

Let's be clear about my expectations. I believed that emergency
personnel and sophisticated equipment would be deployed anywhere in
the United States, at a moment's notice, whenever I needed them. I
would receive state-of-the-art preservation at the limits of
cryobiology. I would have safe, indefinite storage. My brain would be
repaired and reassembled by nanomachines, and I would enjoy biological
immortality. All for $2 per day during my previous lifetime. What a
deal!

Why would I believe such a seemingly far-fetched proposition? Well,
essentially it was a Quick Fix which naturally appealed to my
cryoptimistic mindset. But the way in which Alcor presented itself
also had something to do with it. If you examined the contracts
carefully, they described cryonics as an experimental procedure and
emphasized that the $35,000 was a minimum that didn't really guarantee
anything. Under IRS regulations, a nonprofit organization such as
Alcor could not offer a fee-for-service deal anyway. But the monthly
magazine, and later the web site, may have created a very different
impression--that cryonics was like a futuristic version of medicine,
where you would pay your money and receive a treatment in return.
During the 1980s, _Cryonics_ magazine often ran clip-art showing
scenes such as doctors with stethoscopes and ambulances taking
patients away. I suspect that those of us who joined Alcor then or in
the 1990s were imprinted with these associations, and we probably
perpetuated them to some extent on the Alcor web site. (I say "we,"
because I helped to write that site).

If this occurred, I think it was a mistake. It was too inherently
optimistic--especially bearing in mind that optimism is highly
contagious. People who have an optimistic mindset always feel strongly
inclined to believe other people who are optimistic. This is how Olga
Visser, or Cells4Life, convinced some very smart people to jump
onboard. They became cheerleaders for each other, enjoying a contact
high.

Alcor and its members likewise satisfied each others' needs. The
members enjoyed the idea that they could have it all for next to
nothing, while Alcor enjoyed the steady growth which it believed was
fundamental to its future. Everyone was happy.

Alas, it was not realistic. So far as I can tell, each new member
represented a financial burden. Even at current rates, the service
remains underpriced for what people expect to receive. If we had been
more open to perceiving problems instead of rejecting them, we would
have seen this.

================

9: The Options

Where the underfunding problem at Alcor is concerned, it's too late
for more Delayed Delegation. The future has arrived, and people today
must deal with it. I see only three options. All will inflict pain, as
tends to be the case when we compensate for reckless financial
decisions that were made in the past. The options are:

     1. Charge a higher price for the same level of service.

     2. Charge the same price for a lower level of service.

     3. Charge the same price for the same level of service,
     while delivering it more efficiently.

Or some combination of the above. I remain skeptical that Option 3, on
its own, can cover the total probable funding gap.

Alcor members who imagined that they were paying a fixed fee for a
specific service may feel a sense of betrayal, but all of us should
have seen that a growing organization cannot depend indefinitely on
volunteer or underpriced labor and deep-pocketed donors. We should
have seen the need to get personally involved, instead of viewing
ourselves merely as customers who could ignore cryonics until we
needed it.

I look forward to seeing cryonics organizations operating on a
fiscally sound basis, because I don't see any other way for cryonics
to become stable and viable in the long term. I look forward to fiscal
responsibility even in a worst-case scenario where cryonics becomes
unaffordable for me personally, because I think I was just fooling
myself, back in 1990, when I participated in mutually placatory
wishful thinking. If an organization shows a genuine determination to
moderate its cryoptimism with financial realism, it will become a lot
more worthy of our respect and participation. If it remains fiscally
irresponsible, it will not survive in the long term.

Does this sound unduly pessimistic? I think you would have to be
unduly optimistic to think so.

================

End of "A feature that won't appear in Cryonics magazine."

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=32976

----------------------------------------------------------------------

End of CryoNet Digest
*********************