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Alicorn comments on Normal Cryonics - Less Wrong
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So what you're concerned about is that if your entire family signed up, they might wake up your child but not any of her relatives, or wake all of you up and then not let you actually take care of her?
Yes.
I should add that I don't think my husband and I think cryonics is "creepy". We would sign up, whatever that means.* And if my kids want to sign up when they're old enough to make that decision, then I would let them sign up. It's just not something I feel comfortable doing to a small child; sending them someplace I haven't been and can't imagine.
.* I think the "would" means that so far it sounds OK, but we realize we haven't worked through all the angles and anticipate some oscillations in our POV.
If your children were about to leave for a strange country without you - or for that matter with you, to some place that none of you had ever been - would you, in your pity, shoot them?
WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE? WHY IS YOUR BRAIN NOT PROCESSING THIS? IT'S YOUR KIDS' FUCKING LIVES NOT A FAIRY TALE YOU'RE WRITING. You don't get to be uncomfortable with the fairy tale and so refuse to write it. All you can do is kill your kids. That's it. That's all refusal means.
The visceral reaction to "kill your kids" comes from imagining that you're actually killing them, not letting them go about a normal life. You can argue that it comes down to the same thing, but if they were really the same thing, you could use the less emotionally-loaded language.
What you're saying: What kind of terrible parent lets their kids live a life slightly better than they had?
Mere framing, depending simply on what your brain thinks is normal. Visit a convention of cryonicists and talk to the kids signed up for cryonics. Those parents wouldn't think very highly of themselves if they didn't pay to sign up their kids. If their children died and were lost, they would hold themselves at fault. They're right.
(The obvious metaphor - so obvious, in fact, that it is not even a metaphor - is withholding lifesaving medical care. Consider how we feel about parents who refuse to treat their kid's cancer, for example.)
Yes, that is indeed the analogy - pardon me, classification - that I was looking for.
Huh? How about:
seems more fair.
Not quite. If my phrasing was confusing, try instead:
Exactly. Or "What kind of parent settles for letting their kids have merely a slightly better life than they had when a dramatically better life might be possible?"
The world is largely a pretty normal place. I've lived in Africa and Europe and have spent time in Central America and almost every type of place in the United States. I feel like I could begin to assess the risk to some extent.
What do I know about a future with alien minds? I thought it was you who argued that we can't possibly know their motives and values.
(Take the horrible/awfulness of me wanting to kill my kids and project that onto the future society that might revive them. If it's in me, why can't it be in them?)
Your children are standing in front of the boat. You can send them on the boat. You can go with them on the boat. Or you can cut their throats. That's it. There's nothing else.
I hand you the knife.
What do you do?
I think I'm starting to understand what the absence of clicking is. People who click process problems as if they're in the real world. If they wouldn't cut their child's throat, then they sign their kid up for cryonics.
People who don't click don't process the problem like it's the real world. Strange reactions rise up in them, fears of the unknown, fears of the known, and they react to these fears by running away within the landscape of their minds, and somewhere on the outside words come out of their lips like "But who knows what will happen? How can I send my kids into that?" It's an expression of that inner fear, an expression of that running away, words coming out of the lips that match up to what's going on inside their heads somehow... the dread of losing control, the feeling of not understanding, the horror of thinking about mortality, all of these are expressed in a flinch away from the uncomfortable thought and put stumblingly into words.
So they kill their children, because they aren't processing a real world, they're processing words connected to words, ways of flinching and running away and giving vent to those odd internal feelings.
And the clickers are standing in front of that boat.
Yes, I’m not a “clicker”. I realize this wasn’t addressed to me, but about me, but I don’t see how this should make me feel ashamed or even inadequate. I need to make ethical/moral decisions and I have no choice but to think through them on my own and make my own decision. When I was 16, I was certain that Proof by Induction would not work, and ever since I understood that it did work, I’ve never claimed certainty based on intuition. However, some arrogance remains in that if something doesn’t convince me, I think: why should I be convinced, if I’m not convinced? I haven’t had any feedback from life that my ability to make decisions isn’t working. I have some problems, but they don’t seem related in any way to not clicking. (Well, maybe I need to “click” on you guys just being too culturally different from me.)
I wonder if in response to your hypothetical you expect a reasonable me to suddenly realize, “oh no! I would never kill them!” and thus find the contradiction in my far-mode reasoning about cryonics. But I would. (Filling in drastic and dire reasons for why the children were being taken on a boat against my will.) So would you, I think, slip a deadly but painless pill to a young boy about to be tortured and killed in a religious ceremony if you were certain it was going to happen. Perhaps you were trying to identify an ethical failing: that at one probability of risk I “let them” live, but at a higher level I arbitrarily, cruelly kill them. I don’t think even this is correct; I don’t know where to begin to know how to reason where the ‘killing’ probability would be, and don’t claim that I do. I only know that it would be an agonizing thing for a parent to ever have to decide, but one they can’t escape from just by glibly pretending such scenarios cannot happen, if the scenario does happen.
I submit that I’m an open-minded and curious person that isn’t afraid of new ideas. (I might be afraid of a lion, but I’m not afraid of thinking about lions.) One problem that I seem to have – though I actually like it – is that I tend to forget what my reasoning on any topic is after a while, and I’m more or less a blank slate again. If I have a negative view of cryonics, when I never even heard of it outside of LW, I think it is because I found some inconsistency in your own world view about it.
For example, it hadn’t really occurred to me at first that 'somebody strange' might revive my daughter. My concerns were “near-concerns” – how in the world would I ever get an ambulance in time, much less get her frozen in time, in this backwater place I live in where they aren’t even competent enough to insert a child catheter correctly? But then I read several times this suspiciously repetitive chant that ‘they’re not worried’ about negative-value futures because being revived would select for positive futures.
Well, that’s clearly not dependable optimism. We might get revived just because they want to cut down on energy costs in Arizona, and keeping 20 million people frozen takes a lot of power. Maybe they have a penchant for realistic theater and want to simulate the Holocaust with real non-genetically modified humans.
In my mind, previous to hearing the chant, was that all of these scenarios were unlikely because the world is normal. Obama and byrnema and Joe 6-pack and maybe Eliezer have children, and then their children have children, and then the children of these revive us and we live in a world that is essentially the same or somewhat better. But when I process people talking about the set of possible futures like it’s actually really large enough to include all kinds of horrors with non-negligible probability, then unwarranted optimism in the direction of the probability of something I or they know nothing about does not comfort me.
That is the outcome of the group applying epistemic hygiene to only arguments that lead to conclusions they disagree with. The bad arguments for the views they agree with, left untouched, will sway a person like me who does not think in a linear way, but organically assimilates assumptions and hypotheses as I encounter them.
Your description of not-clicking sounds functionally similar to what Amanda Baggs calls 'widgets', though she uses the term in a more political than personal context.
This. This so god-damn hard.
It looks to me like you have the choice between running a small risk of your daughter thinking you abandoned her (to a scary future that won't leave you in a satisfactory family unit)... or running a slightly larger risk of actually abandoning her (to the gaping maw of death). The ideal is that she gets to be 18 without dying and then decides she wants to sign up, of course (and you and other relatives are still alive and ready to join her with stacks of paperwork at the ready), but we're talking about managing risks, here, not the best case.
I hope you don't mind the clarification, but I think you've underestimated the extent to which I negatively value a scenario in which my daughter comes to mental anguish that I cannot experience with her. (For example, I'm not too concerned about the satisfactory family unit, as long as my daughter is psychologically healthy.)
This compared to death, which is terrible for reasons other than "death". Terrible because I will miss her and because of all the relationships disconnected and because her potential living this life won't be fulfilled -- nothing that cryonics will give back.
It seems like the stream of consciousness of a person is greatly valued here on Less Wrong, for its own sake independent of relationships. Could you/someone write something to help me relate to that?
I realize this is probably weird coming from me, considering my own cryonics hangup, but we're already assuming they won't revive anyone they can't render passably physically healthy - I think they'd make some effort to take the same precautions regarding psychological health. My psychological need is weird and might be very hard to arrange to satisfy or predict what would be satisfactory; generic needs for care and affection in a small child are so obvious I would be astounded if the future didn't have an arrangement in place before they revived any frozen children.
I'll try, but I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "the stream of consciousness" or "independent of relationships". I value me (my software), I value you (your software), I prefer that these softwares be executed in pleasant environments rather than sitting around statically - but then, I'd probably cease to value my software in an awful hurry if it had no relationships with other software, and I'd respect a preference on your part to end your own software execution if that seemed to be your real and reasoned desire.
Why do I have these values? Well, people are just so darned special, that's all I can say.
No it's not. It's just scary.
You really, really think that this, on the one hand, is "obvious", but on the other hand, a superintelligence is going to look inside your head and go, "Huh, I just can't figure that out."
YOU ARE A SMALL CHILD. We all are. I know that, why can't everyone see it?
Am I parsing this correctly? You're intending to say that Alicorn isn't really experiencing what she's reporting that she is, but is instead just making it up to avoid acknowledging a fear of cryonics?
That's fairly obviously wrong: If Alicorn really was scared of cryonics, the easiest thing for her to do would be to ignore the discussions, not try to solve her stated problem.
It's also pretty offensive for you to keep suggesting that. Do you really think you're in a better position to know about her than she's in to know about herself? You're implying a severe lack of insight on her part when you say things like that.
I am not suggesting that Alicorn is anything other than what she thinks she is.
But when she suggests that she has psychological problems a superintelligence can't solve, she is treading upon my territory. It is not minimizing her problem to suggest that, honestly, human brains and their emotions would just not be that hard for a superintelligence to understand, predict, or place in a situation where happiness is attainable.
There simply isn't anything Alicorn could feel, or any human brain could feel, which justifies the sequitur, "a superintelligence couldn't understand or handle my problems!" You get to say that to your friends, your sister, your mother, and certainly to me, but you don't get to shout it at a superintelligence because that is silly.
Human brains just don't have that kind of complicated in them.
I am not suggesting any lack of self-insight whatsoever. I am suggesting that Alicorn lacks insight into superintelligences.
I see at least one plausible case where an AI couldn't solve the problem: All it takes is for none of Alicorn's friends to be cryopreserved and for it to require significantly more than 5 hours for her brain to naturally perform the neurological changes involved in going from considering someone a stranger to considering them a friend. (I'm assuming that she'd consider speeding up that process to be an unacceptable brain modification. ETA: And that being asked if a particular solution would be acceptable is a significant part of making that solution acceptable, such that suggested solutions would not be acceptable if they hadn't already been suggested. (This is true for me, but may not be similarly true for Alicorn.))
That's a... nasty way to describe one of my thousand shards of desire that I want to ensure gets satisfied.
Your desire isn't the problem. Maybe it was poorly phrased; "psychological challenge" or "psychological task for superintelligence to perform" or something like that. The problem is finding you a friend, not eliminating your desire for one. Sorry that this happened to match a common phrase with a different meaning.
It's just a phrase. If someone isn't being intentionally hurtful, you should remind yourself that a lot of what we are doing here is linguistic games.
This argument might have already gone on too long, but I'm going to try stating as what I see as your main objection to see if I actually understand your true objection.
You hold not having your consciousness altered or manipulated or otherwise tinkered with as an extremely high value. You think you'll probably be miserable in the future and you find it hard to believe that the FAI will find you a friend comparable to your current friends. You won't want to accept any type of brain modification or enhancement that would make you not miserable. If you're sufficiently miserable, it's likely than a FAI could change you without your consent, and you prefer death to the chance of that happening.
I'm going to outright ignore you on this one. I have been met with incredulity, not mere curiosity ("Can you tell us more about the experiences you've had that let you model this extreme need?"), let alone commiseration ("wow, me too! let's make friends and sign up together and solve each other's problems!") when I have described this need here. This tells me that what I have going on is really weird and nobody here has accurately modeled it. I do not think you can make predictions about this characteristic of mine when you are still so confused about it. A FAI probably could. You aren't one. And since I know more about the phenomenon than you, I'm going to trust my predictions about what the FAI would say on inspecting my brain over yours. I think it'd say "wow, she would not hold up well without any loved ones nearby for longer than a few hours, unless I messed with her in ways she would not approve."
You're raving. Perhaps you are deficient in a vitamin or mineral.
I am not incredulous that you want friends! I am incredulous that you think not even a superintelligence could get them for you! This has nothing to do with you and your needs and your private inner life and everything to do with superintelligence! It wouldn't even have to do anything creepy! Human beings are simply not that complicated!
Upvoted because: with that many exclamation points, how could you be wrong?
You think the best thing a FAI could do would be to throw up its hands and say, "welp, she's screwed"?
Why not? There are likely problems we think are impossible that a superintelligence will be able to solve. But there are also likely problems we think impossible which turn out to actually be impossible.
I am very confident that an FAI could, if necessary create a person to order, who would be perfectly tuned to becoming someone's friend in a few hours. How often does this kind of thing happen by accident in kindergarten?
Impossibility should be reserved for things like FTL and reversal of entropy, not straightforward problems of human interaction.
Nope. The best thing it could do would be retrieve my dead friends and family. But if we're talking about whether I should sign up for cryonics, I'm assuming that's the only way somebody gets to be not dead after having died a while ago. If we have an AI that's so brilliant that it can reconstruct people accurately just by looking at the causal history of the universe and extrapolating backwards, I'm safe whether I sign up or not! And if we have one that can't, I think I'm only safe if I am signed up with at least one loved one.
Out of curiosity - how accurate would the retrieval need to be? For instance, suppose the FAI accessed your memories and reconstructed your friends based on the information found there, extrapolating the bits you didn't know. Obviously they wouldn't be the same people, since the FAI had to make up a lot of stuff neither you nor it knew. But since the main model was a fit to your memories, they'd still seem just like your friends to you. Would you find that acceptable?
You can think of no scenarios between those two that would entice you to sign up? Your arguments seem really specious to me.
I think the right context for Eliezer's comment is Expected Creative Surprises.
I like people too. :)
I agree with Eliezer that any benevolent reviver would be able to figure out how to create conditions that would make a child (and you) happy.
I definitely have in mind a non-benevolent reviver.
Consider this hypothetical situation:
Medical grade nanobots capable of rendering people immortal exist. They're a one time injection that protect you from all disease forever. Do you and your family accept the treatment? If so, you're essentially guaranteeing your family will survive until the singularity, at which point a malevolent singleton might take over the universe and do all sorts of nasty things to you.
I agree that cryonics is scarier than the hypothetical, but the issue at hand isn't actually different.
Children are only helpless for about 10 years. If the singleton came within 10 years of my child being born without warning, it would be awful but not my fault. If I had any warning of it coming, and I still chose to have children that then came to harm, it would be my fault.
Why does fault matter?
Good question. The reason is because that this has recently become an ethical problem for me rather than an optimization problem. Perhaps that is why I think of it in far mode, if that is what I'm doing. But I do know that in ethical mode, it can be the case that you're no longer allowed to base a decision on the computed "average value" ... even small risks or compromises might be unacceptable. If I allow my child to come to harm, and I'm not allowed to do that, then it doesn't matter what advantage I'm gambling for. I perceive at a certain age they can make their own decision, and then with relief I may sign them up for cryonics at their request.