Glenn Reynolds On Academic Corruption

Prominent libertarian, transhumanist, law professor, and intellectual welterweight Glenn Reynolds has just run an essay on corruption in universities in the New York Post. I love it when professors stand up and loudly proclaim they're not like the bastards who run the place. The path to tenure is so crowded with choices to take the system or leave it that nobody who's made a career in the academy can claiim to be without sin -- but let's leave that aside for now.

Reynolds's latest brought back to mind his transhumanist faith, through which he's publicly acknowledged that he has a contract to have his head removed and frozen at the time of his putative "death", on rhe expectation that at some future date, Science will not only have developed a cure for what finally ailed him, but it will be able to thaw his frozen head out, resuscitate it, reattach it to a donor body, and presumably allow him to resume his tenured chair at the University of Tennessee Knoxville as though nothing had intervened.

I occasionally try to torment my infinitely tolerant wife, a retired insurance attorney, with questions about what the frozen head model of the afterlife would do to the insrance industry if someone proved this could be done -- a likelihood on which Reynolds and others already feel confident enough to have placed serious bets. This time, when I brought the question up again, she was able to counter, "Why don't you ask AI?", which has become her version of "Ask your mother".

So I went to the oracle with this question: "What would be the effect on the life insurance industry if it wedre proven possible to resuscitate a frozen head and attach it to a new body?" Keep in mind that clients of frozen head enterprises typically finance their contracts by buying a life insurance policy with the beneficiary being the enterprise that proposes to freeze their heads. I wondered if this would actually constitute insurance fraud, since the policyholder would be buying the policy with the expectation that he would come back to life once the policy paid out.

I was actually able to get my wife to help me with my query to AI by specifying that a life insurance carrier could, if it chose, list frozen head enterprises among those whom it will not allow as beneficiaries, but she's not aware of any that have done this. Anyhow, the oracle answered,

If scientists prove we can resucitate a frozen head and attach it to a new body, it would completely disrupt the life insurance industry. The core business model relies on the permanent finality of death.

It went on give what must be a very preliminary and tentative list of changes that would have to be made in the industry:

Redefining the Legal Definition of Death

• Contract triggers must change.
• Policies pay out at "legal death."
• Contracts must define "permanent death."
• Temporary suspension is not death.
• Freeze status might pause payouts.

Restructuring Payouts and Claims

• Claims will turn into loans.
• Payouts may fund the resuscitation.
• Benefits could become medical trusts.
• Families might face frozen assets.
• Fraud risks will skyrocket initially.

In other words, the instant someone could prove you can freeze a head, thaw it out, resuscitate it, and reattach it to a donor body, it would upend the very industry that finances the whole frozen head con, such that all existing frozen head contracts would probably be challenged as invalid, and certainly no further frozen head contracts of the earlier sort could be written. This would almost certainly drive existing frozen head enterprises into bankrupcy well before only a few frozen heads could be properly thawed and reattached -- the scores of thousands remaining would almost certainly be lost before any organized effort could save them.

But let's ask a couple more questions. Glenn Reynolds is a law professor. Not only has he structured his own estate on the basis that he can have his head frozen at "death" and be brought back to life in the future, but he has endorsed those beliefs for the public generally, even though if this were at all practical, it would seriously change the overall legal environment by redefining death. Let's just take another example: currently, you can't libel the dead. So someone publishes a book saying damaging things about a dead guy. Can the dead guy now come back to life and sue the book's author for libel?

Why isn't he publishing books warning of the implications of this, rather than blowing the whistle about how AI will make porn impossibly irresistible? He begins his clarion call on academic corruption thus:

One industry in America pumps out toxic waste day and night, but suffers no penalty for the damage it causes.

It operates at enormous public and private expense, sucking up hundreds of billions of dollars in government money.

He concludes,

And much of what students learn isn’t so.

For example Marxism, which has never worked in the real world, remains stylish on campuses — still treated as a hot new concept, though it hasn’t changed much in over a century.

Racism, sexism, antisemitism and destructive economic ignorance, all from a huge and vastly expensive system that was supposed to make our society better.

It’s time for a change.

But Reynolds himself is ensorsing cryonics, another piece of hokum that's never worked in the real world, and he's using his academic prestige to do it. Marxism as a tool for social analysis has a good deal more merit than cryonics, which at best is nothing but insurance fraud, espeically if it ever could be shown actually to work. If anyone wants a good example of academic corruption, I'd point to Glenn Reynolds a lot sooner than many other people.