X-Message-Number: 19405
Date: Thu, 4 Jul 2002 10:44:09 -0700 (PDT)
From: Scott Badger <>
Subject: Re: Attitude Quiz

> From: Robin Helweg-Larsen <>
> Subject: attitude quiz
> 
> For Scott Badger:
> 
> My sense of the Survey was that it didn't allow
> participants to
> comfortably acknowledge their belief in a soul, and
> had an element of
> trying to convince them of the merits of cryonics
> rather than
> dispassionately assessing their attitudes and
> opinions.

I agree. I think at the time I was unintentionally
trying to educate (and hopefully persuade) as much as
assess the participants' attitudes. In addition, as a
non-believer, I probably was somewhat insensitive to
the believers' frame of reference. Overall though, I
think the results were still generally valid for that
group.
 
> However, I thank you for the Survey!  I personally
> agree with the
> overall findings, and I would be interested to see
> how much shift there
> has been in attitude in the intervening couple of
> years.  I suspect that
> cryonics is becoming a main-stream concept (if not
> accepted as
> personally appropriate, or humanly possible) in
> tandem with cloning.

My personal experience suggests that cryonics is not
at all a mainstream concept on par with something like
cloning. This is precisely because cloning has been
demonstrated to work and cryonics has not.
Consequently, there's likely been little shift. In
fact lots of (uninformed) folks still think cryonics
is a scam where some outfit takes in huge amounts of
insurance benefits and all they have to do is freeze
and store human bodies that will never be revived. In
addition we've had a number of movies misinforming the
public about cryonics (e.g. Vanilla Sky). I keep
hoping that someday, Halperin's "The First Immortal"
will actually get produced since it's the only
realistic portrayal I know of.
 
> Could you do an updated Survey with the same group?

Not possible, I'm afraid.

Best regards,

Scott Badger

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free
http://sbc.yahoo.com

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=19405