I know a guy.

Since the early 1990's I've known a cryonics enthusiast who recently had to drop out for financial reasons, though he still has the life insurance policy for $50,000 which he bought years ago to pay for his suspension when Alcor charged less for the neuro option.

Normally I would feel some sympathy. But in his case, he suffers from a self-inflicted damage load. During my acquaintance with this individual, I've seen him waste a lot of time and money in the search for a series of tricks, gimmicks and shortcuts to try to get ahead in life, even though The Gods of the Copybook Heading decree that these things don't work compared with the boring, basic habits which usually get the job done, if anything will. For example, this individual lost money in a blatant pyramid scheme in the late 1990's call StockGeneration, and he may have lost money in other ill-advised investments as well.

I've also had to witness his other obsessions, delivered either in phone conversations or posted on the internet: Neo-Tech, Y2K (we know how that turned out), Lyndon LaRouche, conspiracy theories, quack medical beliefs, Jew-hating rants, and lately the threat that a new ice age poses to cryonics. I would nominate him as the poster child for the Dunning-Kruger Syndrome. Before he took his most recent blog private, I advised him that he should distrust his own judgment, given his track record, and follow the advice of people who can make better decisions for him. At the very least he should restrict his activities to a handful of things which have a basis in reality and work reliably so that he can reduce his anxiety level - doing the Henry David Thoreau thing, for example.

This individual, although an extreme example, shows the cognitive problem cryonicists face: We want to live a really long time, and we think about "the future" in a more self-interested way than most. (What do cryonicists call magazines about astronomy? Real estate magazines.) Yet we have inadequate mental equipment for dealing with "the future" in the most effective ways. The human mind evolved s a disposable kludge for replicating genes, not for keeping the mind itself in business for centuries; so we need to find techniques to counteract its nature and make it do what we need it to do for our survival. I would like to see serious discussions of this problem at cryonics conferences, instead of more cryonics theater about revival through physically impossible nanomachines.