X-Message-Number: 30644
References: <>
From: Kennita Watson <>
Subject: Re: Visionaries dying, values
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:32:51 -0700

Rudi Hoffman wrote:
>
> It is heartbreaking to see a visionary writer...yet another one
> after Carl Sagan... die without the precious pattern of his
> unique brain  preserved via cryonics.

I am coming to the conclusion that it is best to save
my heartbreak for those who want to live.  Those who
know about cryonics, can easily afford it, and reject
it have made their choice.  A major goal of Go Cryo! is
to lay the choice as clearly as possible in front of
as many people as possible so they can make a well-
informed decision.

Life is not everyone's highest value.

I just now watched a presentation from Session 2 of
"Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0" (which I highly
recommend Googling and watching all of, BTW) by
Jonathan Haidt.  It explains a lot of why cryonics
isn't popular in the society at large.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3896569197654224883
>
> I am genuinely saddened, few individuals have had the impact with  
> their
> ideas and books that Clarke had.  I still remember the huge scope  
> of his  vision
> in "The City and the Stars," and "Childhood's End", and other books  
> that
> considered a very interesting and generally positive future.

By all means, grieve if you are so inclined.
>
> I had written Clarke some years ago, even trying to broker a "cost   
> free"
> suspension for him and a few other thought leaders for the  
> incredible  publicity
> value...but to no avail.  I had read that he thought "people   
> should die and
> make room for the next generation" or some such nonsense.

As Haidt mentions, he (and others) just used that as
a rationalization for his intuition that it was
somehow wrong.  And of course calling it nonsense
wouldn't help.
>
> Especially annoying was that I read "Clarke had some of his DNA  
> sent  into
> space."  So what?  Is it a failure of imagination, as Robert   
> Ettinger points
> out?  Or, is it possibly a failure in the way that cryonics  is  
> generally
> presented?
>
> It is an axiom in the marketing business  that "Failure to hit the  
> target
> is...never the fault of the target."
>
> Somehow the DRAMA, the EXCITEMENT, of the ONLY real world possible  
> time
> machine to the future...cryonics...is not translating to most of  
> the mass mind
> and media.
>
> According to multiple studies of decision making, people tend to make
> decisions emotionally and then justify them rationally.

Right:  most people don't give a damn about drama
and excitement, or the future for that matter.
And that their "sense of life", as Ayn Rand would
call it, is largely intractable to convincing.  A
quote that has stuck with me for decades:  "You
can't reason a man out of something he was never
reasoned into."
>
> Most of us in cryonics intentionally shy away from the emotionally  
> driven
> "hype machine" that is behind most mass movements.  Whether it is  
> Nike  athletic
> wear, the Christian church, CocaCola, or Scientology, there is a   
> marketing
> machine backed by clever memetic engineers who create a desire.

If it were just about marketing and engineering,
there would be more ways to get traction on it.
It's much more basic -- more primal -- than that.
>
> As Ettinger and many others have pointed out, cryonics is indeed a  
> "hard
> sell."

If you're trying to sell into the wrong market, yes.
As frustrating as it may be, cryonics sells to an
extremely niche market.
>
> My small contribution to this conundrum is the book I am   
> writing...have been
> working on for about seven years...called "The Affordable   
> Immortal:  How You
> Can Fund the New Science of Biostasis."
>
> I hope to  have this published by May.  I have an estate planning  
> attorney
> collaborating on the cryonics estate planning and wealth  
> preservation topics
> and  chapters.
>
> And the early part of the book is about a surprisingly interesting  
> idea
> called "Life Insurance."  And how the industry and products have  
> evolved to
> generate the astonishingly cost effective and affordable programs  
> available to  us
> today.
>
> But the real meat of the book is about the IDEOLOGY and  PHILOSOPHY  
> and
> REASONABLENESS of the cryonics experiment.  Done in the form  of  
> dialogues with a
> software engineer considering signing up for cryonics, the  heart  
> of the book
> is about the "Why" as much of the "How" of cryonics.   While I  
> could be wrong,
> I really think this is pretty interesting material.

I'd love to publicize your book.  Realize, though, that
the ideas will only be able to sink into minds that
have not been emotionally hardened against them.  Telling
people about the affordability of cryonics will make a
difference if affordability was really the obstacle, as
opposed to it being a convenient rationalization for "I
don't want to".  The same for explaining "Why".  Socratic
dialogue can work on intellectual problems; not so much
on emotional ones.
>
> Because the people reading this bulletin board are among the  
> thought  leaders
> in the still nascent cryonics movement, I may be emailing some of you
> individually to get your take on the book as it develops.

I'd love to have a chance to read it, if you think I'd
have any valuable insights, though March is a bit late
for "as it develops" for a book being published in May.

> ...
> In closing, we as a (mostly virtual) community need to continue to  
> work on
> getting a highly influential thought leader to publicly sign up and  
> promote the
> idea of cryonics.  Could we develop a thread where we dream and  
> speculate
> who might be good in this role?  I will personally commit to  
> writing them  with
> the proposal, if we can come up with the right match.

That would be too easy.

A highly influential thought leader apparently wouldn't
help.  Most people live in a "monkeysphere" of 150 or
fewer people whose thoughts and feelings they really
care about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the_dunbar_numb.html
http://www.nehrlich.com/blog/2004/12/15/

Sorry if this is disjointed; it's random thoughts,
not an essay.

Live long and prosper,
Kennita

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