Okay, looks like I have to lower my probability that « Alcor and CI are serious ». Now this is from over a year ago. Maybe there’s some sign things have changed since? I guess not, unless they acquired some Lukeprog like leadership.
I’ll read the whole thing to try and determine to what extent this is incompetence, and to what extent this is scammy (for instance, dust and dirt look like incompetence, but the hardened doors with plywood roof looks a bit more suspect).
It might be difficult to tell incompetence apart from malice, moreover, it is possible to transition from one to the other:
Let’s say you start a cryonics organization with all good intentions, then you start running into problems: costs are higher than expected, mishaps occur during the cryopreservation process, evidence that your process is flawed starts to accumulate and you have no idea on how to fix it, etc. So what do you do?
Apologize for the bad service you sold, thaw and bury the frozen corpses (since you know they are already damaged beyond repair), disband the organization and find a new job, risking to face legal action? That’s what a perfectly honest person would do.
But if you are not perfectly honest, you might find yourself hiding or downplaying technical issues, cutting the costs at the expense of service quality, using deceitful marketing strategies, and so on.
Maybe you could rationalize that the continued existence of your organization is so important that it should be preserved even at the cost of deceiving some people, maybe you could even deceive yourself into ignoring your essentially fraudolent behavior and maintain a positive self-image (if you were attracted to cryonics in the first place, chances are high that you are prone to wishful thinking).
But, whatever your intentions are, at this point your business has become a de facto scam.
Okay, looks like I have to lower my probability that « Alcor and CI are serious ». Now this is from over a year ago. Maybe there’s some sign things have changed since? I guess not, unless they acquired some Lukeprog like leadership.
I’ll read the whole thing to try and determine to what extent this is incompetence, and to what extent this is scammy (for instance, dust and dirt look like incompetence, but the hardened doors with plywood roof looks a bit more suspect).
It might be difficult to tell incompetence apart from malice, moreover, it is possible to transition from one to the other:
Let’s say you start a cryonics organization with all good intentions, then you start running into problems: costs are higher than expected, mishaps occur during the cryopreservation process, evidence that your process is flawed starts to accumulate and you have no idea on how to fix it, etc. So what do you do?
Apologize for the bad service you sold, thaw and bury the frozen corpses (since you know they are already damaged beyond repair), disband the organization and find a new job, risking to face legal action? That’s what a perfectly honest person would do.
But if you are not perfectly honest, you might find yourself hiding or downplaying technical issues, cutting the costs at the expense of service quality, using deceitful marketing strategies, and so on.
Maybe you could rationalize that the continued existence of your organization is so important that it should be preserved even at the cost of deceiving some people, maybe you could even deceive yourself into ignoring your essentially fraudolent behavior and maintain a positive self-image (if you were attracted to cryonics in the first place, chances are high that you are prone to wishful thinking). But, whatever your intentions are, at this point your business has become a de facto scam.