X-Message-Number: 29490 From: Date: Sat, 5 May 2007 11:47:21 EDT Subject: Dude, where's MY fact checking? Apology for booboo In a message dated 5/5/2007 4:00:44 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, writes: HO HO HO! This excerpt in turn excerpted from Daniel Wilson's book/article reprinted from today's cryonet was a disappointment. The guy may or not have gotten his facts right about other new techs... And I will leave comment on the first paragraph to Brian Wowk and/or other technical researchers in cryonics/cryobiology. But, it takes just a short net search to find there are exactly TWO companies currently accepting cryonics clients. Can anyone reach Daniel Wilson and educate him a bit? Regards, Rudi writing again, re: above comment posted yesterday. I apologize to Jim Yount and the American Cryonics Society. Counting ACS, I believe there are exactly THREE organizations accepting cryonics clients. This is still less than the "dozens" referred to...and objected to in my posting. Actually, it will be good, perhaps, when there really ARE dozens of options available for cryonicists to select among. There is a term...I don't know if it is a real word or a neologism made up by an author in the libertarian magazine "Reason"...called "PLENITUDE." This basically refers to the multiplicities of choice most of us enjoy in our relatively free and prosperous economies. I will be going to shop at Target with my wife Dawn in a few minutes. There we will find not just a SINGLE option for buying the decaf coffees I like...but a whole shelf full of them. Deciding which "Extra Virgin Olive Oil" to select took me 5 minutes last time...there were literally over ten choices! You have probably read some of the studies...or just summaries of them...that show that too MANY choices can actually lead to less "satisfaction." We humans can get into what has been called the "paralysis of analysis." Ironically, the more intelligent people were in the studies, the greater their "angst" and the lower their satisfaction levels regarding choices made among multiple alternatives. This evidently has to do with people (probably including most cryonics oriented people reading this list) tending to be what were termed "optimizers" instead of "satisfisers." So, when you select your non-fat decalf mocha at Starbucks, you are wondering, "Gee, I wonder if it would have been even better with an extra shot of vanilla flavoring?" While this "The greater the choices, the lower the satisfaction" equation may be true in some contexts, I am a proponent of PLENITUDE in nearly all it's forms. Ironically, while I am a proponent of plenitude ideologically, I must confess that my personal satisfaction levels do INDEED go down when choices go up...especially when they go up directly. More personal disclosure that I probably should not write...yesterday, as a member of the Port Orange Chamber of Commerce we had a meeting in a local State Farm office. This State Farm agent has built...just completed... this HUGE 30,000 square foot office, with 12 foot ceilings, state of the art built in wi-fi, conference rooms with astonishing training and audio-visual equipment, even a huge garage to house his personal recreational vehicle bus. In short, a "Taj Mahal" of personal and professional infrastructure. The State Farm agent, while a bit of a jerk personally, has certainly "paid his dues" over 35 years of tremendous effort. In short, he arguably deserves this amazing edifice to his competence and ego. He is, and is not, a competitor of mine, however. I really don't do that much local business, and he is strictly local. But, I regret...and i am indeed mortified... to find that my personal satisfaction level about my financial planning practice...and my level of success in life...has gone down. Dammit, I should be ABOVE such petty professional jealousies...I want to be better than this. I normally rejoice in people's successes and accomplishments....but the plenitude bar of what looks like "being a success in the financial planning and insurance business" was just raised so high for me, I realize I will probably NEVER have such an amazing building, or multiple staff office. I realize I am ambitious, and I just got my butt kicked, even though the State Farm office does not hurt my career in the slightest. I have a reasonably successful practice, and a niche market in cryonics that I love, and knowing there is alternative way of running a practice should not make me feel like a loser. The State Farm office does most property and casualty insurance, which I don't do, for god's sake! But it does. These are totally irrational, emotional, embarrasing, and downright stupid feelings I am experiencing...but I think they may be on point to the question "Do multiple choices give one a better sense of joy and satisfaction in life?" And, it turns out, my ideological bias is at odds with my personal experience in at least one instance for this question. So, once again, I could be wrong about "plenitude is a good thing." Once again, I have rambled from my subject heading... Let's all agree to check our facts at least once...and have a sense of "this is provisionally true unless evidence leads elsewhere" attitude about our pronouncements... Warm Regards, Rudi Rudi Richard Hoffman CFP CLU ChFC Board Member Financial Planning Association fpafla.org Board Member Salvation Army salvationarmy.org Member Alcor Life Extension Foundation alcor.org Certified Financial Planner(TM) CFP Board of Standards Member Libertarian Party libertarianparty.org Member National Rifle Association nra.org Member World Transhumanist Association http://transhumanism.org/ World's Leading Cryonics Insurance Provider rudihoffman.com ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=29490