X-Message-Number: 23076 Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 13:53:50 -0500 (EST) From: Charles Platt <> Subject: millionaires etc References: <> All right let's go through this one more time. Ideas are welcome. Obviously. But in any field, when people suggest ideas without bothering to read some background in the field, their ideas are likely to be naive and they are likely to be reinventing the wheel. So, the first lesson is, do your homework. Enthusiasm is welcome. Obviously. But when this merely translates into suggesting things for other people to do, in a field which is short of volunteers willing to work, a natural response is, "If you think you have such a great suggestion, why not pursue it yourself?" So much for the aspects which I thought were self-evident. Now, regarding the old old idea that a few more millionaires are all we need: Here are the reasons (which have been spelled out before on Cryonet, incidentally) why I believe very wealthy people may be unwilling to put money into cryonics. Of course there may be exceptions to this rule, and I invite anyone to try to find some of these exceptions. For reasons which will become clear I believe that recipients of inherited wealth will be better prospects than self-made millionaires. __ Someone who is highly motivated to make money is by definition a competitive individual. The essence of a competition is that there is a finish line and a set of rules. "The person with the most toys, wins," right? The competitors may try to break the rules in order to win, but still they acknowledge the existence of the rules. Now imagine you are telling such a person that the whole rule structure in which he has lived and competed is possibly invalid. There is a future in which his wealth may be irrelevant, his values may be obsolete, his legacy may be forgotten, and there is in fact no finish line, because life may not end. I suggest that the concept of an end-point to life (after which, heirs inherit the cash or a building is named after the wealthy individual) is actually fundamental to the competitive money motivated personality. The idea that he might "come back" in a radically different place where all the rules have changed is not at all reassuring. On the contrary, it could force a very disturbing reassessment of the most fundamental principles on which the person's life has been based. Moreover, as Curtis Henderson pointed out to me long ago, all the people who surround a wealthy individual will want him to stay dead. How would Michael Eisner feel right now if Walt Disney really had been frozen, and might be resuscitated at any time? How would the heirs of a millionaire feel if the millionaire could "come back" and sue to recover some of his money, on the grounds that since he is now alive, he wasn't really dead after all? Since people who have a lot of money must rely a lot on their advisors to sustain their empires, we must assume that the advisors will be highly motivated, consciously or unconsciously, to offer negative opinions regarding cryonics. Third, there is the issue of risk. Rich people love money; that's why they are rich. They are constantly endangered by other people trying to con them out of their money, one way or another. They develop elaborate defense mechanisms to protect themselves from scams. Cryonics, at first sight, has all the signs of being a scam. Orthodox scientists mock it, very few people have signed up, it's run by amateurs, the hardcore adherents are not, shall we say, at the center of the bell curve, it has its own weird vocabulary (e.g. "suspension," a word which should be abandoned as quickly as possible), and there is absolutely no proof that it works. I would guess that cryonics registers near maximum on any wealthy person's "scam detection meter." Finally if you put money into cryonics, you take it away from some other recipient, such as your heirs. And you are implicitly stating that you don't believe in salvation. This doesn't look good, and many wealthy people tend to care, somewhat, about their public image. Instead of asking why millionaires don't put money into cryonics, a more sensible question might be, why any millionaire ever _would_ put money into cryonics. This could be a very interesting line of inquiry. I asked Don Laughlin (in a taped interview) why he had signed up, and he just said, "I like the odds." Why did this extremely shrewd man tell me that resuscitation seems "pretty much a done deal" to him, while other wealthy individuals would not share this opinion? I don't know the answer to this question, but I would like to. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=23076