= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Alicorn comments on Normal Cryonics - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (930)
I'm still trying to convince my friends.
It's still not working.
Maybe I'm doing it backwards. Who is already signed up and wants to be my friend?
What's the difference between making friends now and making friends after you wake up? What's the difference between making a family now, and making a new family then? (here I'm referencing both this comment about finding new friends, and your comment in the other thread about starting a new family)
If a friendly singularity happens, I think it's likely that the desire of extroverts like you for companionship and close relationship will have been taken into account along the way and that forming these bonds will still be possible.
Of course right now I'd want to be with my current fiancé, and I'm planning to try to convince her to sign up for cryonics, but if I lost her, I'd still rather live and have to figure out another way to get companionship in the far future than to die.
First of all, my friends aren't interchangeable. It's already a big step for me to be willing to make a presorted cryonics-friendly friend as a substitute for getting my entire existing cohort of companions on board, or even just one. Second of all, waiting until after revival introduces another chain of "ifs" - particularly dreadful ifs - into what's already a long, tenuous chain of ifs.
Of course they aren't. I'm just saying that I'd prefer making new friends to death, and that despite the fact that I love my friends very much, there's nothing that says that they are the "best friends I can ever make" and that anybody else can only provide an inferior relationship.
Once again, between the certitude of death and the possibility of life in a post-friendly-singularity world, I'll take the "ifs" even if it means doing hard things like re-building a social circle (not something easy for me).
I'm just having a really hard time imagining myself making the decision to die because I lost someone (or even everyone). In fact, I just lost my uncle (brain cancer), and I loved him dearly, he was like a second father to me. His death just made me feel even more strongly that I want to live.
But I suppose we could be at opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to these kinds of things.
I guess I'm just more dependent on ready access to deeply connected others than you? This sounds like a matter of preferences, not a matter of correctly turning those preferences into plans.
If you need friends post suspension you can pay for my suspension (currently my budget goes to X-risk) and I will promise to spend a total of at least one subjective current human lifetime sincerely trying to be the best friend I can for you unless the revived get a total of less than 100 subjective human lifetimes of run-time in which case I will give you 1% of my total run-time instead. If that's not enough, you can also share your run-time with me. I will even grant you the right to modify my reward centers to directly make me like you in any copy running on run time you give me. This offer doesn't allow your volition to replace mine in any other respect if the issue is important.
I'd bet karma at 4 to 1 odds that Alicorn finds this proposal deeply disturbing rather than helpful.
You're on. Alicorn, would you be so kind as to arbitrate? We need you to evaluate which of these three categories Michael's offer fits in to:
Would 'slightly amusing' count as helpful if it served to create slightly more confidence in the prospect of actively seeking out the friendship the potentially cryonically inclined?
Yep, disturbing. "Deeply" might be pushing it a little. But a) I'll have to mess with my budget to afford one suspension, let alone two, and while I'd chip in for my sister if she'd let me, people I do not yet know and love are not extended the same disposition. b) There's presently no way to enforce such a promise. c) Even if there were, that kind of enforcement would itself be creepy, since my ethics would ordinarily oblige me to abide by any later change of mind. d) This arrangement does nothing to ensure that I will enjoy MichaelVassar's company; I'm sure he's a great person, but there are plenty of great people I just don't click with. e) I do not like the idea of friendships with built-in time quotas, I mean, ew.
"Deeply" seemed unlikely given that 'deeply disturbing' would have to be reserved in case Michael had seriously offered his services as a mercenary to carry out a kidnapping, decapitation, and non-consensual vitrification.
But it is so efficient! Surely Robin has made a post advocating such arrangements somewhere. ;)
EDIT:
I found all the information I need here: http://www.cryonics.org/become.html
I find it rather odd that no one has answered the original question.
I'm signed up, and I'll be your friend.
Someone did answer via PM, but the more, the merrier. Preferred mode of offsite contact?
PM sent with details.
I'll say it again: It's much easier for you to sign up alone than it is to convince your friends to sign up with you.
I will sign up when I have a reasonable expectation that I'm not buying myself a one-way ticket to Extrovert Hell.
I thought "I'm so embarrassed I could die" was just a figure of speech.
You weren't convinced by Eliezer's post? Do you think signing up for cryonics will get you ostracized from your social circles? Besides the two witnesses on some of the forms, nobody will know unless you tell them or flaunt your ID tags. Are there no two people who you are willing to trust with a secret?
...This has nothing to do with embarrassment. The problem isn't that people will stop being my friend over it, the problem is that they will all die and then the best case scenario will be that I will wake up in a bright new future completely alone.
I'm actually still confused. That doesn't sound like 'Extrovert Hell'. Extroverts would just make a ton of new friends straight away. A lone introvert would have more trouble. Sure, it would be an Extrovert Very Distressing Two Weeks, but death is like that. (Adjust 'two weeks' to anything up to a decade depending on how vulnerable to depression you believe you will be after you are revived.)
I honestly do not think I'd last two weeks. If I go five conscious hours without having a substantial conversation with somebody I care about, I feel like I got hit by a brick wall. I'm pretty sure I only survived my teens because I had a pesky sister who prevented me from spending too long in psychologically self-destructive seclusion.
This sounds like an unrealistically huge discount rate. To be precise, you anticipate:
(a) One week of being really unhappy while you go through the process of making new friends (perhaps with someone else who's really unhappy for similar reasons). I assume here that you do not find the process of "making a new friend" to be itself enjoyable enough to compensate. I also suspect that you would start getting over the psychological shock almost immediately, but let's suppose it actually does take until you've made a friend deep enough to have intimate conversations with, and let's suppose that this does take a whole week.
(b) N years of living happily ever after.
It's really hard to see how the former observer-moments outweigh the latter observer-moments.
I think it's this that commenters are probably trying to express when they wonder if you're thinking in the mode we name "rational": it seems more like a decision made by mentally fleeing from the sheer terror of imagining the worst possible instant of the worst possible scenario, than any choice made by weighing and balancing.
I also tend to think of cryonics as a prophylactic for freak occurrences rather than inevitable death of old age, meaning that if you sign up now and then have to get suspended in the next 10 years for some reason, I'd rate a pretty good chance that you wake up before all your friends are dead of old age. But that shouldn't even be an issue. As soon as you weigh a week against N years, it looks pretty clear that you're not making your decision around the most important stakes in the balance.
I know you don't endorse consequentialism, but it seems to me that this is just exactly the sort of issue where careful verbal thinking really does help people in real life, a lot - when people make decisions by focusing on one stake that weighs huge in their thoughts but obviously isn't the most important stake, where here the stakes are "how I (imagine) feeling in the very first instant of waking up" versus "how I feel for the rest of my entire second life". Deontologist or not, I don't see how you could argue that it would be a better world for everyone if we all made decisions that way. Once you point it out, it just seems like an obvious bias - for an expected utility maximizer, a formal bias; but obviously wrong even in an informal sense.
I think that the distress would itself inhibit me in my friend-making attempts. It is a skill that I have to apply, not a chemical reaction where if you put me in a room with a friendly stranger and stir, poof, friendship.
Um... would I deeply offend you if I suggested that, perhaps, your worst fears and nightmares are not 100% reflective of what would actually happen in reality? I mean, what you're saying here is that if you wake up without friends, you'll be so shocked and traumatized that you'll never make any friends again ever, despite any future friend-finding or friend-making-prediction software that could potentially be brought to bear. You're saying that your problem here is unsolvable in the long run by powers up to and including Friendly superintelligence and it just doesn't seem like THAT LEVEL of difficulty. Or you're saying that the short-run problem is so terrible, so agonizing, that no amount of future life and happiness can compensate for it, and once again it just doesn't seem THAT BAD. And I've already talked about how pitting verbal thought against this sort of raw fear really is one of those places where rationality excels at actually improving our lives.
Are you sure this is your true rejection or is there something even worse waiting in the wings?
What about this: leave instructions with your body to not revive you until there is technology that would allow you to temporarily voluntarily suppress your isolation anxiety until you got adjusted to the new situation and made some friends.
If you don't like how extraverted you are, you don't have to put up with it after you get revived.
But the availability of such technology would not coincide with my volunteering to use it.
Would you be opposed to using it? Would you be opposed to not returning to consciousness until the technology had been set up for you (i.e. installed in your mind), so it would be immediately available?
Wow. That isn't an exaggerating? Is that what normal extraverts are like or are you an outlier. So hard to imagine.
That seems like a fairly extreme outlier to me. I'm an extrovert, and for me that appears to mean simply that I prefer activities in which I interact with people to activities where I don't interact with people.
Nope, not exaggerating. I say "five hours" because I timed it. I don't know if I'm an outlier or not; most of my friends are introverts themselves.
Sounds like "five hours" might be something worth the pain of practicing to extend. Maybe not for you, but outlier time-brittle properties like that in me worry me.
Because the last time you woke up in a brand-new world with no friends turned out so badly?
If you're talking about how I have no prior experience with revival, all I can say is that I have to make plans for the future based on what predictions (however poor) I can make now. If you're talking about how I was born and that turned out okay, I have... y'know.. parents.
For many people, parents are a neutral or net negative presence. But alright.
If you had to choose between being born to an orphanage and not being born - a situation which is symmetrical as far as I can see to your objection to cryonics - would you choose to not be born?
That depends on the circumstances which would have led to me being born to an orphanage. If somebody is going around creating people willy-nilly out of genetic material they found lying around, uh, no, please stop them, I'd be okay with not having been born. If I'm an accident and happened to have a pro-life mother in this hypothetical... well, the emphasis in pro-choice is "choice", so in that case it depends whether someone would swoop in and prevent my birth against her will or whether she would change her mind. In the latter case, the abortion doctor has my blessing. In the former case, (s)he hasn't, but only because I don't think medically elective surgery should be performed on unwilling patients, not because I think the lives of accidental fetuses are particularly valuable. If I was conceived by a stable, loving, child-wanting couple and my hypothetical dad was hit by a bus during my gestation and my mom died in childbirth, then I'd be okay with being born as opposed to not being born.
If you don't like being alone in the bright new future you can always off yourself.
Or try to make friends with other recently-revived cryonicists. That's what extroverts are good at, right?
That would be a fine way to spend money, wouldn't it, paying them to not let me die only for me to predictably undo their work?
My comment about suicide was a joke to contrast my recommendation: make friends.
I think you assign high probability to all of the following:
Please correct me if I'm wrong. If you think any of those are unlikely and you think cryonics will work, then you should sign up by yourself.
Yeah. Even though a couple of them have expressed interest, there is a huge leap from being interested to actually signing up.
This is my present plan. We'll see if it works.
I'm not willing to bet on this.
I do not want my brain messed with. If I expected to arrive in a future that would mess with my brain without my permission, I would not want to go there.
I have to say, if 3 fails, I would tend to downvote that future pretty strongly. We seem to have very different ideas of what a revival-world will and should look like, conditional on revival working at all.
If you want make friends with cryonicists, sign up. For every one person I meet who is signed up, I hear excuses from ten others: It won't work. It will work but I could be revived and tortured by an evil AI. The freezing process could cause insanity. It'll probably work but I've been too lazy to sign up. I'm so needy I'll kill myself without friends. Etc.
It gets old really fast.
Are you supposed to be the extrovert in the 'extrovert hell' scenario? Extroverts generally don't have trouble finding new friends, or fear a situation where they find themselves surrounded by strangers.
I'm the extrovert, yes. In the sense of needing people, not in the sense of finding them easy to be around (I have a friend who finds it fantastically amusing to call herself a social introvert and me an antisocial extrovert, which is a fair enough description). I actually get very little value from interacting with strangers, especially in large groups. I need people who I'm reasonably close to in order to accomplish anything, and that takes some time to build up to. None of my strategies for making new friends will be present in a no-pre-reviv-friends-or-family wake-up scenario.
If the choice were available, would you change any of that?
I think that would depend heavily on the mechanism by which it'd be changed. I'd try cognitive exercises or something to adjust the value I get from strangers and large groups; I don't want to be drugged.
Hmm, ok. I'd say you're using 'extrovert' in a fairly non-standard way but I think I understand what you're saying now.
I think of an extrovert as someone who recharges by being around other people, and an introvert as someone who recharges by being alone, regardless of social proclivity or ability.
"I make new friends easily" is one of the standard agree/disagree statements used to test for extraversion which is why I find this usage a little unusual.
(Although naturally there tends to be a correlation with the latter two.)
Maybe you could specify that you only want to be revived if some of your friends are alive.
I'll certainly do that on signup; but if I don't think that condition will ever obtain, it'd be a waste.
I'm pretty sure you will have friends and relatives living in 2070. Do you think it'll be more than 60 years before cryonics patients are revived? Do you think it'll be more than 60 years before we can reverse aging?
I think it is reasonably likely that those tasks will take longer than that, yes.
Given the opening post I am not sure I understand what you are saying. What about being resurrected with the people described would be an Extrovert Hell? That you don't have any pre revival friends?
I'm referencing a prior thread. Pre-revival friends or family are a prerequisite for me not looking at the prospect of revival with dread instead of hope.
With those values the 'find friends who are signed up to cryonics' sounds like the obvious plan. (Well, less obvious than the one where you kidnap your friends, cut of their head and preserve it against their will. But more sane.)
I don't think most of my friendships would survive kidnapping, decapitation, and non-consensual vitrification, even if my friends survived it.
A friend will help you move. A good friend will help you move a body. A great friend is the body.
That sounded pretty odd until I looked up the parent comment, I gotta tell you.
This is an incredibly good joke.
But, but!..
Okay, 1) I dislike the "shut up and multiply" sentiment anyway, since it's so distinctly consequentialist. I will not shut up, and I will only multiply when everything I'm multiplying is really commensurate including in a deontic sense. I will walk away from Omelas should I have occasion. And 2) it's my freakin' life. I'm not deciding to deny someone else the chance to be ferried to the future on the basis of it sounding lonely.
Is there some other significance to the links and quote that you hoped I'd extract?
The significant claim seems to be that it is often necessary to quell an instinctive reaction in order to best meet your own preferences. There are some reflectively consistent preferences systems in which it is better to die than to suffer the distress of a lonely revival but there are many more that are not. I take Vladmir's suggestion to be "make sure this is what you really want, not just akrasia magnified a thousand times".
Often claims of the shape of Vladimir's are intended to enforce a norm upon the recipient. In this case the implied 'should' is of the kind "action X may best give Y what they want" which is at least slightly less objectionable.
I did a reversal test on the preference; if everybody I cared about disappeared from my life all at once and everybody who remained was as alien as the people of the future will likely be, I would probably want to die, no cryonics required.
I take it you read "Transmetropolitan?" I don't think that particular reference case is very likely.
I bet that online dating and friend making will work a lot better in the future. There probably exist many people in the future that appreciate your unique knowledge and want to get to know you better.
When you wake up in the future, you will probably immediately meet people from a time not so unlike our own. Going through physical and mental rehab with them could be a good way to form lifelong friendships. You are never going to be the only person from the 20th and 21st century in the future.
Can you talk more about why your future is so dreadful? Stating that all possible futures are worse than death is a strong statement. In this reversal test, it even assigns a "probably" to being suicidal. I think your flaw in reasoning lies there. I don't think that being "probably" suicidal in the future is sufficient reason to not visit the future.
In our time, we morally justify the forcible hospitalization and medication of suicidal people until they aren't suicidal anymore. With Friendly AI, this moral justification may remain true in the future, and once you're on drugs or other brain enhancements, you'll probably love life and think your self from your first life absolutely insane for preferring death to glorious existence. Again, I think your desire for deep connections with other people is likely to be nearly immediately fixable in the future. This does sound a little dystopian, but I don't think there exist very many wake-up futures in which your existential misery can not be fixed.
To me, it seems like in nearly all cases it is worth waiting until the future to decide whether or not it is worth living.
I'm in the process of signing up (yeah, I know, they're all saying that... But I really am! and plan to post about my experience on LW once it's all over) and I'll be your friend too, if you'll have me as a friend.
Even if you were not signed up and never planned to be, I can always use more friends! What's your preferred offsite contact method?
I've always wondered what the "Add to Friends" button on LW does, so I'm trying it out on you. (I hope you don't mind!)
It's a feed agregator. There used to be a link on LessWrong to view all contributions by "Friends", but it was removed some time past.
I don't mind at all, but I haven't found it to do anything much when I've tried it.
Indeed not; all it seemed to do (at least on my end) was transform itself into a "Remove from Friends" button. Did anything happen on your end?
I detected no change.
On his overview page, can you see which articles he liked/disliked?
Doesn't look like it.
I can see bgrah449's - I think that's what "Make my votes public" does.
I sent you a private message.
I'm working on it. Is taking a bit longer than planned because insurance company seemed to throw a few extra hoops for me to jump through. (including some stuff from some samples they took from me that they don't like. Need to see a doc and have them look at the data and pass judgement on it for the insurance company). Hence need to make doc appointment.
Actually having the process underway is probably close enough. Preferred mode of offsite contact?
Am available email, IM, phone or online voice chat. (Any direct meetup depends on where you live, of course)
The first two though would probably be the main ones for me.
Anyways, will PM you specifics (e-addy, phone number, other stuff if you want (as far as IM, lemme know which IM service you use, if any).
Hrm... LWbook: Where giving (or getting) the (extremely) cold shoulder is a plus. ;)