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Blueberry comments on Normal Cryonics - Less Wrong
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AFAICT your statement is simply false.
Why? It'll be a huge boost for cryonics when the first person is brought back. People will be able to see with their own eyes, for the first time, that it actually works. Until then, it's still speculative.
"certain it would work" != "certain it's not a scam"
Things that work are usually not called scams.
Pills that cure cancer for $5000 a month are scams. People who can contact deceased loved ones are offering scams.
Whether the people who provide the service believe in their service or not, services that rely on technology we don't have available yet are scams. I'm sure that there are people in Alcor who feel extra pressure, knowing that if cryonics doesn't work, they're essentially scamming their members.
Even in a world where cryonics works, we could imagine a "cryonics scam" where a company took money for cryonics and then didn't freeze/revive people.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "work". If I gave my money to a cryonics company and and they purposely didn't freeze me or revive me, I would say that it didn't work.
But we're talking about whether or not people would trust it wasn't a scam, even if it wasn't.
If the infrastructure for something is in place then people usually do trust that it isn't a scam. (Infrastructure often means safeguards against scamming anyway.) Most people trust hospitals to provide medical care.
Well, actually that's a good example. Even though hospitals have a lot of infrastructure throughout the country, people still have a limited trust in them. There are often good reasons for this. And then people are supposed to turn around and have boundless faith in the operations of a tiny, private, nearly secret company?
The point is the other side of the implication: things that are not scams don't always work.
You are thinking of scam in the sense of 'deliberate fraud'. A quick survey of definitions on the web support your sense as by far the dominant one, and mine more or less non-existent. I was meaning scam in the sense of wasting your money, and certainly including the case of deliberate fraud.
Think about it from the point of view of the mother that must make smart economical decisions in order to make sure the bills are paid each month; if she told me that cryonics was a 'scam' I would understand her meaning.
I think Eliezer describes this sense of scam quite well here, because indeed it doesn't make a difference for this sense if the cryonics companies have good intentions, and are working really intensively, and are in the hole financially. I just disagree there is any problem with this quick perception, from that mother's point of view. She's still thinking, 'a fool and his money are easily parted'.
I'm not such a mother. I bought two of those "One Laptop Per Child" OLPC laptops for $400 two years ago. I was willing to invest in an idea I cared about, even though it didn't seem like it was going to work.
Were they a scam? I think they had great intentions ... but if there isn't a child somewhere with a laptop because of my purchase, then, yes, they were. Even if this is just because OLPC hadn't anticipated that adults would take the laptops and resell them.
And, finally, I don't know for certain but I suspect that many of the medium-type persons that contact relatives and tell fortunes have sincere intentions of some kind.
Now that you've discovered the standard meaning of the phrase "scam", I think it would be best if we stuck to it rather than gratuitously switching to a private language. Perhaps there is another term that covers the whole category of expenditures that don't work out the way you want.
How about Boondoggle
Excellent!
Perhaps we're coming from different perspectives, but my point of view is that you're being gratuitously aggressive. (Consider the wording of your first two sentences and imagine it read with a snarl, as I did.) Is that going to be the general result of this post here on Less Wrong?
I don't make big sweeping apologies unless it (a) actually matters, and I feel badly or (b) the polite context of the exchange is established so that it is not an unfair status hit.
If you insist of making me take a status hit that I think is unfair -- even though I've lost karma for this whole exchange, and MichaelGR already told me he didn't agree with my use of the word, and I already sound like a jerk throughout the whole exchange because I keep changing my mind about whether or not people think cryonics is a deliberate scam -- then I'll have to admit that I just don't think my broader usage of 'scam' is so uncommon.
Here are 2 examples of people using 'scam' in the sense I mean.
The Bottled Water Scam
Whole Life Insurance is a Scam
So that I only want to reply sarcastically so sorry I used a word that wasn't immediately agreed with by everyone.
I am including all of this as an immediate-case-study response relevant to the post Logical Rudeness, to write what goes through my head when I'm pressed for a formal statement of defeat when I felt I had already made polite concessions. I think otherwise -- without the reason to call attention to these thoughts -- I would have just written something slightly passive aggressive, but mostly even more concessionary then the latest concession.
Everyone's in a mood on LW today, it seems, and I don't exclude myself. I meant to come across with a much lighter tone than that, to be sure, and I don't mean to commit the sin that C S Lewis describes so well in "The Screwtape Letters" of insisting that one's own words be taken strictly at face value while reading every possible connotation and side meaning into the words of others.
But I really do think that using the term "scam" in this way is inadvisable, and that the links you provide are using the term in a hyperbolic way, to smuggle in the implication of insincerity on the part of the providers without proof. I really think that "scam" denotes the wrong concept and certainly strongly carries the wrong connotations. whpearson's suggestion of "boondoggle" is a good one.
I'm not sure how to address what you say about "status". But I like to think that one of the things we're better at here is conceding gracefully and accepting it gracefully. If I've given the discussion an emotional charge that makes that difficult, that wasn't my intent.
I voted you up. Your latest comment left me feeling expansive rather than defensive, and that feels like a much better place to be rationally.
So I'm not sure why, in this expansive mood, I'm stll not willing to fully agree. For now I'll call it "stubbornness of purpose" -- I do want to 'smuggle in' those negative connotations while describing the negative feelings people have for cryonics -- and think about whether this is a flaw in character or rationality or something more positive or neutral.
Why?
EDIT: Why are you sure of this, I mean.
Because I'm sure that some of them have good intentions. They might know that they're doing their best to give people a chance, but if they're human (?) they would also feel the responsibility of all these people depending upon them.
All you say in this comment seems true, but not the part in your previous comment about "if cryonics doesn't work, they're essentially scamming their members."
If I pay firefighters to extinguish the fire that is burning down my house, and they try, do the best they can under the conditions they have to work in, but my house still burns down in the end, have they scammed me?
I don't think "scam" is the right word.
I'm sure the employees of cryonics organizations would be extremely disappointed if cryonics somehow didn't work, and they would probably feel sad for the loss of many potential lives, but if they actually tried their best, I highly doubt that they'd feel like they did something morally wrong or scam-like.
AFAIK, no serious Cryonics organization with actual facilities is guaranteeing a result (being revived). In legalese, it's a "best efforts obligation" rather than an "obligation to achieve a specific result".
I concede that the service that they're actually providing is an opportunity for revival only. That has a value, and people are willing to pay for that value.
The cryonics facility owner who thinks of it exactly like this will sleep well at night. However, people usually have more complex relationships with reality. The cryonics owner knows he is selling optimism about cryonics. Do you think he would feel that it was moral to continue selling memberships if he thought the probability was virtually zero?
Unless the seller is withholding information that would change the buyers' estimates, how he feels about the product is immaterial.