Mark, that is a very relevant question, and I think that if we could get at the fundamental answers to it, we might gain tens of thousands of new cryonicists.
Posing these sorts of questions and searching for the answers to them are probably the most worthwhile things we can do to help cryonics.
In your question above, you refer to “social anxiety” in a way that implies that anyone who would wonder about the social costs of cryonics may be suffering from a mental disorder. I think you are completely wrong.
Here are some quotes from that article you cite, and my responses are below them:
Tetronian wrote:
“Over the past few months I’ve been doing a lot of reading about cryonics, and though I agree with the arguments of Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson on the issue, I still feel uncomfortable about actually signing up. Upon reflection, my true rejection is my fear of the social cost of cryonics, i.e. being perceived as weird and completely incomprehensible by everyone around me. ”
Nice to see someone addressing the biggest obstacle to more signups—being seen as a weirdo! Cryonicists do not seem to understand this. And this lack of perception is why cryonics only has 1000-2000 signups or people who want to sign up.
Cryonicists do not seem to understand that people need other people to survive, and if you do not need other people to survive, you might not be a person, at least in some sense of the word.
Seriously. And I say this as one of you. My own connection to family and society has greatly weakened since I signed up, since my worldset changed so that I could see the value of cryonics.
I think that there was more to than just the simple act of signing up and telling my family about it. The thing is that before one can become ‘psychologically eligible’ for cryonics, one has to first divorce oneself from the majoritarian worldview. This iS a process, a journey that we take, and at the end of it, whether we sign up for cryonics or not, we have in a very real sense alienated ourselves from family and from society. We live in a universe of ideas, and not social connections.
99 percent of normal humanity lives in the world of social connections. The very idea of cryonics is so alien to them that scares them. It is literally unworldly. And by the time we pre-cryonicists get to the point where we might sign up, so too are we ourselves unworldly.
more from the article:
“Loss of existing relationships with family, friends, etc. I value the relationships I currently have with my family and friends, and signing up for cryonics would jeopardize many of these relationships. Most of my friends and family members are not interested in rationality and would be completely baffled if I decided to sign up. Nonetheless, I do not want to lose these relationships, as they are currently an important part of my life; I would consider my life to be significantly worse than it is now if I had to sever a lot of these emotional ties.
Increased difficulty of forming relationships in the future. I’m not particularly good at forming new relationships, and I’m very worried that signing up for cryonics will create an insurmountable social stigma that will make it nearly impossible for me to do so.
Overall, though, I have very little information about what the social cost of cryonics really is beyond a few scattered anecdotes and secondhand descriptions of cryonicists’ lives. Ultimately, I don’t really know how many of my fears would actually be realized if I signed up. This makes it difficult to for me to make a decision, as I am very risk-averse and I feel reluctant to choose something that could potentially make the next six or seven decades of my life miserable. As a result, I have decided to engage in some data collection.
To do so, I would like to hear about your experiences. ”
The thing is, Tetronian, that you have already started on that journey away from society and from your family. Signing up for cryonics is just the culmination of this journey.
As an avid reader of books and newspapers, I was aware of cryonics from an early age. I had read about the chatworth scandal. But I only gave cryonics serious thought when I saw an interview with Bill Falloon on TV in the 80s and later found a book about cryonics written in the sixties or seventies by a grad student. She wrote about some of the people in cryonics, particularly saul kent and curtis henderson. She did so from a sociological perspective, and although her approach was clinical/analytical, cryonicists, I think, were not portrayed all that favorably in her book. Reading the book, I was fascinated by it, and yet at the same time I was worried about myself because I felt that I was somehow being tainted by their weirdness. I did not want to be seen as a flake. I was young. YOung people do not want to be seen as flakes. Young people want to conform and be accepted and be like everyone else. As you grow older, you become more independent. Your sense of self becomes stronger. This is when it may become easier to sign up. Unfortunately, by then it is too late to get affordable life insurance.
Thus the vast majority of actual signed up cryonicists are people who became alienated and disconnected enough from society at a fairly young age, young enough to get insurance. YOur basic weirdo, in other words. Like Mark and Mike and me. Weirdos.
If you are a normal 55 year old and well educated, well read, basically godless, independent, childless, well, then you just might have what it takes to be a cryonicist (if cryonics were mainstream and not a playground for outsider flakes, that is...). One big obstacle, though: how do you pay for it? Well, you cannot really get insurance affordable enough to pay for it. Well, maybe a straight freeze from CI. I dunno. Better than nothing, I guess. The thing is that even atheists find god at that point. Most of them, anyway. Keeps the fear at bay. If we could make cryonics a part of society, done locally, and cheaply, we could tap into that older market.
But look at me, rambling on here.
Now, you asked about our personal experiences. Well, back about 20 years ago, I was sitting down at the kitchen table in my Aunt Mary’s kitchen. My dad had driven me over there because he wanted me to have a good talk with her about these weird ideas I had about cryonics etc. Aunt Mary listened to what I had to say about cryonics and then smiled tolerantly at me and said to me, “well, what if when you die, we, your family, decide that you are going to be buried and not frozen?”
I don’t remember what my response was to that. But I can tell you that she did not mean it maliciously. She just could even accept into her head the idea that cryonics might just work. She could not understand that from my point of view, that would be murdering me. I think she did come to understand my point of view. Not because I ever discussed it with her, but she no doubt considered my point of view over the years. When she called me on the phone from what was to be her death bed, when she was dying from cancer, that conversation, although not mentioned aloud, hung in the air between us. She went to her death, certain of her faith. But it was not just cryonics that separated me from her. It was also this vast array of book knowledge I had accumulated over the decades. Yes, that knowledge made it possible for me to accept cryonics. But it also formed a gulf between me and Aunt Mary, between me and my brothers, between me and everyone else. Nowadays, I hide the extent of my knowledge. I try to act like a normal person.
So what is the take away, the moral of story? We cryonicists want to live. We are gonna live, and to hell with everthing else. Because that is the only way we are gonna make it happen.
As for this old atheist, I am studying the Bible, looking for every verse, every phrase, every word I can find to support the idea that science is the proper work of Man, the work that God wants us to do, and that god wants us to live forever, here on earth, through science. We are gonna have to take this battle to the churches, go right after the beating heart of humanity. No other strategy will work.
Thank you for sharing your story. Your insight on this issue is also very interesting. I must admit, the phrase “[Y]ou have already started on that journey away from society and from your family” gave me chills. I wish you best of luck with your own family.
over on cryonet, mark plus wrote:
“Some of the “social costs” of revival sound pretty lame. Do the people who bring up these objections suffer from social anxiety in general?
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/7kj/help_social_cost_of_cryonics/
Mark Plus”
Mark, that is a very relevant question, and I think that if we could get at the fundamental answers to it, we might gain tens of thousands of new cryonicists. Posing these sorts of questions and searching for the answers to them are probably the most worthwhile things we can do to help cryonics.
In your question above, you refer to “social anxiety” in a way that implies that anyone who would wonder about the social costs of cryonics may be suffering from a mental disorder. I think you are completely wrong.
Here are some quotes from that article you cite, and my responses are below them:
Tetronian wrote:
“Over the past few months I’ve been doing a lot of reading about cryonics, and though I agree with the arguments of Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson on the issue, I still feel uncomfortable about actually signing up. Upon reflection, my true rejection is my fear of the social cost of cryonics, i.e. being perceived as weird and completely incomprehensible by everyone around me. ”
Nice to see someone addressing the biggest obstacle to more signups—being seen as a weirdo! Cryonicists do not seem to understand this. And this lack of perception is why cryonics only has 1000-2000 signups or people who want to sign up.
Cryonicists do not seem to understand that people need other people to survive, and if you do not need other people to survive, you might not be a person, at least in some sense of the word.
Seriously. And I say this as one of you. My own connection to family and society has greatly weakened since I signed up, since my worldset changed so that I could see the value of cryonics.
I think that there was more to than just the simple act of signing up and telling my family about it. The thing is that before one can become ‘psychologically eligible’ for cryonics, one has to first divorce oneself from the majoritarian worldview. This iS a process, a journey that we take, and at the end of it, whether we sign up for cryonics or not, we have in a very real sense alienated ourselves from family and from society. We live in a universe of ideas, and not social connections.
99 percent of normal humanity lives in the world of social connections. The very idea of cryonics is so alien to them that scares them. It is literally unworldly. And by the time we pre-cryonicists get to the point where we might sign up, so too are we ourselves unworldly.
more from the article:
“Loss of existing relationships with family, friends, etc. I value the relationships I currently have with my family and friends, and signing up for cryonics would jeopardize many of these relationships. Most of my friends and family members are not interested in rationality and would be completely baffled if I decided to sign up. Nonetheless, I do not want to lose these relationships, as they are currently an important part of my life; I would consider my life to be significantly worse than it is now if I had to sever a lot of these emotional ties. Increased difficulty of forming relationships in the future. I’m not particularly good at forming new relationships, and I’m very worried that signing up for cryonics will create an insurmountable social stigma that will make it nearly impossible for me to do so.
Overall, though, I have very little information about what the social cost of cryonics really is beyond a few scattered anecdotes and secondhand descriptions of cryonicists’ lives. Ultimately, I don’t really know how many of my fears would actually be realized if I signed up. This makes it difficult to for me to make a decision, as I am very risk-averse and I feel reluctant to choose something that could potentially make the next six or seven decades of my life miserable. As a result, I have decided to engage in some data collection.
To do so, I would like to hear about your experiences. ”
The thing is, Tetronian, that you have already started on that journey away from society and from your family. Signing up for cryonics is just the culmination of this journey.
As an avid reader of books and newspapers, I was aware of cryonics from an early age. I had read about the chatworth scandal. But I only gave cryonics serious thought when I saw an interview with Bill Falloon on TV in the 80s and later found a book about cryonics written in the sixties or seventies by a grad student. She wrote about some of the people in cryonics, particularly saul kent and curtis henderson. She did so from a sociological perspective, and although her approach was clinical/analytical, cryonicists, I think, were not portrayed all that favorably in her book. Reading the book, I was fascinated by it, and yet at the same time I was worried about myself because I felt that I was somehow being tainted by their weirdness. I did not want to be seen as a flake. I was young. YOung people do not want to be seen as flakes. Young people want to conform and be accepted and be like everyone else. As you grow older, you become more independent. Your sense of self becomes stronger. This is when it may become easier to sign up. Unfortunately, by then it is too late to get affordable life insurance.
Thus the vast majority of actual signed up cryonicists are people who became alienated and disconnected enough from society at a fairly young age, young enough to get insurance. YOur basic weirdo, in other words. Like Mark and Mike and me. Weirdos.
If you are a normal 55 year old and well educated, well read, basically godless, independent, childless, well, then you just might have what it takes to be a cryonicist (if cryonics were mainstream and not a playground for outsider flakes, that is...). One big obstacle, though: how do you pay for it? Well, you cannot really get insurance affordable enough to pay for it. Well, maybe a straight freeze from CI. I dunno. Better than nothing, I guess. The thing is that even atheists find god at that point. Most of them, anyway. Keeps the fear at bay. If we could make cryonics a part of society, done locally, and cheaply, we could tap into that older market.
But look at me, rambling on here.
Now, you asked about our personal experiences. Well, back about 20 years ago, I was sitting down at the kitchen table in my Aunt Mary’s kitchen. My dad had driven me over there because he wanted me to have a good talk with her about these weird ideas I had about cryonics etc. Aunt Mary listened to what I had to say about cryonics and then smiled tolerantly at me and said to me, “well, what if when you die, we, your family, decide that you are going to be buried and not frozen?”
I don’t remember what my response was to that. But I can tell you that she did not mean it maliciously. She just could even accept into her head the idea that cryonics might just work. She could not understand that from my point of view, that would be murdering me. I think she did come to understand my point of view. Not because I ever discussed it with her, but she no doubt considered my point of view over the years. When she called me on the phone from what was to be her death bed, when she was dying from cancer, that conversation, although not mentioned aloud, hung in the air between us. She went to her death, certain of her faith. But it was not just cryonics that separated me from her. It was also this vast array of book knowledge I had accumulated over the decades. Yes, that knowledge made it possible for me to accept cryonics. But it also formed a gulf between me and Aunt Mary, between me and my brothers, between me and everyone else. Nowadays, I hide the extent of my knowledge. I try to act like a normal person.
So what is the take away, the moral of story? We cryonicists want to live. We are gonna live, and to hell with everthing else. Because that is the only way we are gonna make it happen.
As for this old atheist, I am studying the Bible, looking for every verse, every phrase, every word I can find to support the idea that science is the proper work of Man, the work that God wants us to do, and that god wants us to live forever, here on earth, through science. We are gonna have to take this battle to the churches, go right after the beating heart of humanity. No other strategy will work.
See ya in the pews, brother....
Thank you for sharing your story. Your insight on this issue is also very interesting. I must admit, the phrase “[Y]ou have already started on that journey away from society and from your family” gave me chills. I wish you best of luck with your own family.