I feel like the dog brain studies are at least fairly strong evidence that quite a bit of information is preserved. The absence of an independent validation is largely down to the poor mainstream perception of cryonics. It’s not that Alcor is campaigning to cover up contrary studies—it’s that nobody cares enough to do them. Vis-a-vis the use of dogs, there actually aren’t that many animals with comparable brain volume to humans. I mean, if you want to find an IRB that’ll let you decorticate a giraffe, be my guest. Dogs are a decent analog, under the circumstances. They’re not so much smaller you’d expect drastically different results.
In any case, if this guy wants to claim that cryonics doesn’t preserve fine-grained brain detail, he can do the experiment and prove it. You can’t just point at a study you don’t like and shout ‘the authors might be biased’ and thus refute its claim. You need to be able to provide either serious methodological flaws, or an actual failure to replicate.
According to the PM I got, I had the most credible vegetarian entry, and it was ranked as much more credible than my actual (meat-eating) beliefs. I’m not sure how I feel about that.