CryoNet #33475 - #33476

CryoNet - Mon 14 Mar 2011

    #33475: John Gray on cryonics as a "religious" exercise [MARK PLUS]
    #33476: CryoNet to Enter Stasis March 17, 2011 [Kevin Q. Brown]

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Message #33475
Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2011 08:36:21 -0700
Subject: John Gray on cryonics as a "religious" exercise
From: MARK PLUS <[email protected]>

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2011/feb/14/john-gray-science-religion-philosophy-video

Ironically Gray calls cryonics "cheating death," which assumes exactly
the sort of animistic thinking he talks about. We should strenuously
avoid using that phrase ourselves, because it projects the theory of
mind to where it doesn't belong, and it frames cryonics an unethical
activity.

Of course, if cryonics eventually succeeds as a means of survival,
we'll call it "medicine."

Mark Plus

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Message #33476
Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2011 04:40:55 -0000
Subject: CryoNet to Enter Stasis March 17, 2011
From: "Kevin Q. Brown" <[email protected]>

My "CryoNet Reboot" announcement in message # 32489 was
posted almost a year ago, March 17, 2010.  You probably
are wondering "So when is this reboot? Did I miss it?
And, by the way, where are my flying cars and jet packs?"

There has been a lot of churning in the background.
Many ideas have been tried and just as many discarded.

I even uploaded CryoNet to a Virtual Machine. After getting
all the vital processes running, and achieving perfect
synchronization between the original and the upload so that
you could not distinguish them, I discovered a fatal flaw.
The uploaded CryoNet had exactly the same structural
problems as the original!

CryoNet began over 22 years ago, during a different era,
both technologically and culturally. Any cryonics publicity
was news. With just occasional and notable exceptions,
cryonics was below the radar of the scientific, medical,
and legal authorities. The web (WWW) did not yet exist.
The Domain Name System was not yet predominant. (CryoNet used
UUCP paths for email.) Also, an Open Mail Relay was not yet
fully appreciated as an attractive nuisance that would be
co-opted by spammers.

CryoNet was created more like an Open Meme Relay. For a small
group of reasonable and similarly-minded people, that can work.
Just let everything run on autopilot while the good people
communicate with each other.

But when the inevitable zombie hordes reached a howling
pitch in 2004, I added a "rating system" that nobody liked,
even if it helped. Its administration was fully automated
while CryoNet subscribers rated the quality of the messages.
Bad zombies could be "voted off the island^H^H^H^H^H^H daily digest"
by the other subscribers. (Although all messages still landed
in the web-accessible archives, the ones likely to have poor
quality no longer were shoved in the faces of digest readers.)
But every automated system can be gamed. Thus, "CryoNet Reboot".

That didn't work. Every automated system could be gamed back
then and every automated system still can be gamed now.
And a year has flown by. Rather than spend another year
pursuing yet more schemes for automated quality control,
it is better to put CryoNet on stasis.

After the March 17, 2011 digest mailing, no more new messages
will be posted, although the archives still will be accessible
as a historical record.

Fortunately, unlike 1988, cryonics and related topics now
are covered very well in many other places on the Internet.
Please visit and nourish them. And avoid the zombie hordes.

Kevin Q. Brown
[email protected]
(Please include "cryonics" or "CryoNet" in the subject line.)

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