= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Normal Cryonics
I recently attended a small gathering whose purpose was to let young people signed up for cryonics meet older people signed up for cryonics - a matter of some concern to the old guard, for obvious reasons.
The young cryonicists' travel was subsidized. I suspect this led to a greatly different selection filter than usually prevails at conferences of what Robin Hanson would call "contrarians". At an ordinary conference of transhumanists - or libertarians, or atheists - you get activists who want to meet their own kind, strongly enough to pay conference fees and travel expenses. This conference was just young people who took the action of signing up for cryonics, and who were willing to spend a couple of paid days in Florida meeting older cryonicists.
The gathering was 34% female, around half of whom were single, and a few kids. This may sound normal enough, unless you've been to a lot of contrarian-cluster conferences, in which case you just spit coffee all over your computer screen and shouted "WHAT?" I did sometimes hear "my husband persuaded me to sign up", but no more frequently than "I pursuaded my husband to sign up". Around 25% of the people present were from the computer world, 25% from science, and 15% were doing something in music or entertainment - with possible overlap, since I'm working from a show of hands.
I was expecting there to be some nutcases in that room, people who'd signed up for cryonics for just the same reason they subscribed to homeopathy or astrology, i.e., that it sounded cool. None of the younger cryonicists showed any sign of it. There were a couple of older cryonicists who'd gone strange, but none of the young ones that I saw. Only three hands went up that did not identify as atheist/agnostic, and I think those also might have all been old cryonicists. (This is surprising enough to be worth explaining, considering the base rate of insanity versus sanity. Maybe if you're into woo, there is so much more woo that is better optimized for being woo, that no one into woo would give cryonics a second glance.)
The part about actually signing up may also be key - that's probably a ten-to-one or worse filter among people who "get" cryonics. (I put to Bill Faloon of the old guard that probably twice as many people had died while planning to sign up for cryonics eventually, than had actually been suspended; and he said "Way more than that.") Actually signing up is an intense filter for Conscientiousness, since it's mildly tedious (requires multiple copies of papers signed and notarized with witnesses) and there's no peer pressure.
For whatever reason, those young cryonicists seemed really normal - except for one thing, which I'll get to tomorrow. Except for that, then, they seemed like very ordinary people: the couples and the singles, the husbands and the wives and the kids, scientists and programmers and sound studio technicians.
At some future point I ought to post on the notion of belief hysteresis, where you get locked into whatever belief hits you first. So it had previously occurred to me (though I didn't write the post) to argue for cryonics via a conformity reversal test:
If you found yourself in a world where everyone was signed up for cryonics as a matter of routine - including everyone who works at your office - you wouldn't be the first lonely dissenter to earn the incredulous stares of your coworkers by unchecking the box that kept you signed up for cryonics, in exchange for an extra $300 per year.
(Actually it would probably be a lot cheaper, more like $30/year or a free government program, with that economy of scale; but we should ignore that for purposes of the reversal test.)
The point being that if cryonics were taken for granted, it would go on being taken for granted; it is only the state of non-cryonics that is unstable, subject to being disrupted by rational argument.
And this cryonics meetup was that world. It was the world of the ordinary scientists and programmers and sound studio technicians who had signed up for cryonics as a matter of simple common sense.
It tears my heart out.
Those young cryonicists weren't heroes. Most of the older cryonicists were heroes, and of course there were a couple of other heroes among us young folk, like a former employee of Methuselah who'd left to try to put together a startup/nonprofit around a bright idea he'd had for curing cancer (note: even I think this is an acceptable excuse). But most of the younger cryonicists weren't there to fight a desperate battle against Death, they were people who'd signed up for cryonics because it was the obvious thing to do.
And it tears my heart out, because I am a hero and this was like seeing a ray of sunlight from a normal world, some alternate Everett branch of humanity where things really were normal instead of crazy all the goddamned time, a world that was everything this world could be and isn't.
Then there were the children, some of whom had been signed up for cryonics since the day they were born.
It tears my heart out. I'm having trouble remembering to breathe as I write this. My own little brother isn't breathing and never will again.
You know what? I'm going to come out and say it. I've been unsure about saying it, but after attending this event, and talking to the perfectly ordinary parents who signed their kids up for cryonics like the goddamn sane people do, I'm going to come out and say it: If you don't sign up your kids for cryonics then you are a lousy parent.
If you aren't choosing between textbooks and food, then you can afford to sign up your kids for cryonics. I don't know if it's more important than a home without lead paint, or omega-3 fish oil supplements while their brains are maturing, but it's certainly more important than you going to the movies or eating at nice restaurants. That's part of the bargain you signed up for when you became a parent. If you can afford kids at all, you can afford to sign up your kids for cryonics, and if you don't, you are a lousy parent. I'm just back from an event where the normal parents signed their normal kids up for cryonics, and that is the way things are supposed to be and should be, and whatever excuses you're using or thinking of right now, I don't believe in them any more, you're just a lousy parent.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (930)
Bah. Any FAI worthy of the name will reconstruct a plausible approximation of me from my notebooks and blog comments.
Taking the cryonics mindset to its logical conclusion, the most "rational" thing to do is commit suicide at age 30 and have yourself cryopreserved. Waiting until a natural death at a ripe old age, there may be too much neural damage to reconstitute the mind/brain. And since you're destined to die anyway, isn't the loss of 50 years of life a rational trade off for the miniscule chance of infinite life?
NO.
I'm seeing a disturbing amount of groupthink here. We're all assuming that cryonics is a good thing, and that the only thing in dispute is whether the amount of good that cryonics generates is worth the cost. However, given that no one who has been cryogenically frozen has yet been revived, how do we know that cryonics is a good thing at all? I mean, what if the freezing process somehow changed neurochemistry so that everyone who came back was a psychopath? Given that we don't have any evidence either way, why are we all jumping to the conclusion that cryonics is something that we'd all sign up for if only we had the means?
Never say "groupthink" unless you have better evidence than people agreeing.
I'm only posting this to play devils advocate, if not to stir up the debate a bit. I apologize for any spelling or grammatical errors. English isn't my first language.
(My interpretations may be flawed, feel free to point out any flaws in my logic)
> 1. Illusions of invulnerability creating excessive optimism and encouraging risk taking. Cryonics = eternal life in the future, relatively high financial risk, relatively low risk of being revived. The risk is still worth if if you could possibly be alive again.
> 2. Rationalizing warnings that might challenge the group's assumptions. Reanimation in the future might be expensive, reanimation might not be possible, Alcor may go bankrupt, Consciousness may not be transferable, reanimation is not possible now.
> 3. Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group, causing members to ignore the consequences of their actions. The diehards of the group seem to take no hesitation to call another person outside of their name if they simply do not agree with those who support cryonics.
>4. Stereotyping those who are opposed to the group as weak, evil, biased, spiteful, disfigured, impotent, or stupid. "If you don't sign your child up for cryonics you're a lousy parent"
> 5. Direct pressure to conform placed on any member who questions the group, couched in terms of "disloyalty". Not so much pressure as people questioning those who aren't yet sold on cryonics just yet, or those who don't believe in it all together.
>6. Self censorship of ideas that deviate from the apparent group consensus. This obviously can't be proven, I'm assuming some have omitted statements from their replies to this article to avoid conflict.
>7. Illusions of unanimity among group members, silence is viewed as agreement. I'm not so sure if there is an illusion of unanimity, seems that everyone is in agreement that cryonics is a logical/rational choice. This maybe be an illusion, I don't know.
>8. Mind guards — self-appointed members who shield the group from dissenting information. Hello Eliezer.
I'd like to state that I have no intentions of attacking anyone discussing this topic. I'm only trying to stir up friendly debate.
Actually, devil's advocacy is probably the best way to prevent group think (outside of earnest dissent). So well done.
It also occurs to me that some people holding a belief as a result of group think is entirely consistent with the belief being true and even justified-- which is an interesting feature that isn't always be obvious. I think I represent a partial data point against group think in this case because I have a something of a revulsion against the aesthetics of cryonics, some of the social implications and some of the arrogance I see in it's promotion but nonetheless conclude that it is probably a worthwhile gamble.
I'll raise an issue here, without taking a position on it myself right now. I'm not saying there is no answer (in fact, I can think of at least one), but I think one is needed.
If you sign up for cryonics, and it is going to work and give you a very long life in a posthuman future, given that such a long life would involve a huge number of observer moments, almost all of which will be far in the future, why are you experiencing such a rare (i.e. extraordinarily early) observer moment right now? In other words, why not apply the Doomsday argument's logic to a human life as an argument against the feasibility of cryonics?
Because that logic is flawed.
If I (the Furcas typing these words) lived in 3010, 'I' would have different memories and 'I' would be experiencing different things and thus I (the Furcas typing these words) would not exist. Thus there is no likelihood whatsoever that I (the Furcas typing these words) could have existed in 3010*.
There may be something left of me in 3010, just as there is something left of the boy I 'was' in 1990 today, but it won't be me: The memories will be different and the observations will be different, therefore the experience will be different. Asking why I don't exist in 3010 is asking why experience X is not experience Y. X is not Y because X does not equal Y. It's as simple as that.
*Except, of course, if I were put in a simulation that very closely replicates the environment that I (believe I) experience in 2010.
Your final paragraph is a very limited list of the ways parents can spend money on their children. For example, what if the choice is between spending more money on your current kids (like by signing them up for cryonics), and having more kids? By giving kid 1 immortality, you snuff out kid 2's chance at life. There are more life or not-life tradeoffs going on here than merely cryonics.
Anyway, there are a bunch of things mixed up in your (understandably) emotional paragraph. Like: what do parents owe their children? And: is cryonics a cost-effective benefit? Both of these links seem somewhat suspect to me.
I'm still a few million in net worth away from thinking cryonics is worth the cost.
The tradeoff between kid 1 and kid 2 doesn't exist, because kid 2 doesn't exist. There is no kid 2 to whom to give life, any more than there is a kid 2 to whom to give a popsickle. To do good or ill by kid 2, kid 2 has first to exist; bringing kid 2 into existence is not a good for kid 2, nor is denying kid 2 existence a wrong, because kid 2 has no prior existence to grant hir good or ill. You can't harm an hypothesis.
Maybe there are better examples out there, but this isn't very convincing to me.
The limiting factor on the number of kids that people have very rarely seems to be money, despite what some people will say. Actions speak louder than words, and the poor have more kids than the rich.
And if cryonics is a problem because it makes people have fewer kids (which remains to be seen), it's pretty low on the list of things that produce that effect (f.ex. cheap birth control, careers, and the desire for a social life have certainly "snuffed out" many more potential kids than cryonics ever did (if any)).
How do you figure that?
Are you aware that cryonics paid for via life insurance usually costs a few hundreds a year for someone your age, and probably less for a young child? You've probably played bigger poker hands than that. If money's a limiting factor, it should be easy to trim that amount from the fat somewhere else in the budget.
Here's a simple metric to demonstrate why alternatives to cryonics could be preferred:
Suppose we calculate the overall value of living as the quantity of life multiplied by the quality of life. For lack of a better metric, we can rate our quality of life from 1 to 100. Thus one really good year (quality = 100) is equal to 100 really bad years (ql = 1). If you think quality of life is more important, you can use a larger metric, like 1 to 1000. But for our purposes, let's use a scale to 100.
Some transhumanists have calculated that your life expectancy without aging is about 1300 years (because there's still an annual probability that you will die from an accident, homicide, etc.). Conservatively, let's assume that if cryonics and revivification are successful, you can expect to live for another 1000 years. Also, knowing nothing else about the future, your quality of life will be ~50. Thus your total life-index points gained is 50,000. But suppose that the probability that cryonics/revivification will be successful is 1 in 10,000, or .0001. Thus the expected utility points gained is .0001 * 50,000 = 50.
It will cost your $300/year for the rest of your life to gain those expected 50 points. But suppose you could spend that $300 a year on something that is 80% likely to increase your quality of life by 5 points a year (only 5%) for the rest of your life (let's say another 50 years). There are all kinds of things that could do that: vacations, games, lovers, whatever. That's .80 * 5 * 50 = 200 expected utility points.
You're better off spending your money on things that are highly likely to increase your quality of life here and now, then on things that are highly unlikely or unknown to increase your quantity and quality of life in the future.
I think this hugely underestimates both the probability and utility of reanimation. If I am revived, I expect to live for billions of years, and to eventually know a quality of life that would be off the end of any scale we can imagine.
I can't argue that cryonics would strike me as an excellent deal if I believed that, but that seems wildly optimistic.
This seems an odd response. I'd understand a response that said "why on Earth do you anticipate that?" or one that said "I think I know why you anticipate that, here are some arguments against...". But "wildly optimistic" seems to me to make the mistake of offering "a literary criticism, not a scientific one" - as if we knew more about how optimistic a future to expect than what sort of future to expect. These must come the other way around - we must first think about what we anticipate, and our level of optimism must flow from that.
Not always - minds with the right preference produce surprising outcomes that couldn't be anticipated, of more or less anticipated good quality. (Expected Creative Surprises)
Agreed - but that caveat doesn't apply in this instance, does it?
It does apply, the argument you attacked is wrong for a different reason. Amusingly, I see your original comment, and the follow-up arguments for incorrectness of the previous arguments as all wrong (under assumptions not widely accepted though). Let's break it up:
(1) "If I am revived, I expect to live for billions of years"
(2) "That seems wildly optimistic"
(3) "We must first think about what we anticipate, and our level of optimism must flow from that"
(3) is wrong because the general pattern of reasoning from how good the postulated outcome is to its plausibility is valid. (2) is wrong because it's not in fact too optimistic, quite the opposite. And (1) is wrong because it's not optimistic enough. If your concepts haven't broken down when the world is optimized for a magical concept of preference, it's not optimized strongly enough. "Revival" and "quality of life" are status quo natural categories which are unlikely to survive strong optimization according to the whole of human preference in a recognizable form.
The best alternative to cryonics is to never need it -- to live long enough to be able to keep living longer, as new ways of living longer are developed. Cryonics is only an emergency lifeboat into the future. If you need the lifeboat you take it, but only when the ship is doomed.
Or as Ralph Merkle put it, "cryonic suspension is the second-worst thing that can happen to you".
To put this in perspective, $300/year is the cost of my ACM subscription. That's a rounding error as far as increasing my quality of life is concerned, way below 5%.
For about a billion people in the world, $300 a year (or $500, as it sounds the numbers probably really are) would double their income, very probably increasing their quality of life dramatically. I'd rather give my money to them.
See also my (ill-received) post Against Cryonics & For Cost-Effective Charity.
Welcome to LessWrong!
While it's not relevant to Mornedil's point (about his own quality of life), this was my major objection to cryonics for a while as well. There are a couple of problems with it: Most people don't currently donate all their disposable income to charity. If you do, then a cryonics subscription would actually trade off with charitable donations; if you're like most people, it probably trades off with eating out, seeing movies and saving for retirement.
As MixedNuts points out below, most people don't hesitate to spend that much on accepted medical treatments that could save their lives; another, related point is that people on cryonics may not feel the need to spend millions on costly end-of-life treatments that will only extend their lives by a few months. A disproportionate high portion of medical costs come from the last year of life.
Thirdly, if you estimate the money spent on cryonics could save 20 lives in a third world country, you are choosing between extending 20 lives for a few decades and (possibly) extending one life for millions of years. Which side of that tradeoff you prefer depends a lot on your view of immortality.
Finally, ask yourself "If I was offered cryonics for free, would I sign up?" If not, this isn't your true rejection.
I do. I give away all my earnings and my husband gives about 20% of his, so we live on a much smaller budget than most people we know.
This would be good. But it would be good if people laid off the end-of-life spending even without cryonics.
Maybe. I only heard of the idea a week ago - still thinking.
You have my great respect for this, and if you moreover endorse
and you've got some sort of numerical lives-saved estimate on the charities you're donating to, then I will accept "Cryonics is not altruistically maximizing" from you and your husband - and only from you two.
Unless you have kids, in which case you should sign them up.
The metric I care more about is more like quality-adjusted life years than lives saved. We've been giving to Oxfam because they seem to be doing good work on changing systems (e.g. agricultural policy) that keep people in miserable situations addition to more micro, and thus measurable, stuff (e.g. mosquito nets). The lack of measurement does bother us, and our last donation was to their evaluation and monitoring department. I do understand that restricted donations aren't really restricted, but Oxfam indicated having donors give specifically to something as unpopular as evaluation does increase their willingness to increase its budget.
We may go with a more GiveWell-y choice next year.
Only if I believe my (currently non-existing) children's lives are more valuable than other lives. Otherwise, I should fund a cryonics scholarship for someone who definitely wants it. Assuming I even think cryonics is a good use of money, which I'm currently not sure about.
The ethics of allocating lots of resources to our own children instead of other people's, and of making our own vs. adopting, is another thing I'm not sure about. If there are writings on LW about this topic, I haven't found them.
In light of the sustainability concerns that Carl Shulman raises in paragraphs 2, 3 and 4 here; I'm not sure that it's advisable to base the (major) life choice of having or adopting children on ethical considerations.
That being said, if one is looking at the situation bloodlessly and without regard for personal satisfaction & sustainability, I'm reasonably sure that having or adopting children does not count as effective philanthropy. There are two relevant points here:
(a) If one is committed to global welfare, the expected commitment to global welfare of one's (biological or adopted) children is lower than that of one's own commitment. On a biological level there's regression to the mean and at the environmental level though one's values does influence those of one's children, there's also a general tendency for children to rebel against their parents.
(b) The philanthropic opportunity cost of having or adopting children is (in my opinion) so large as to eclipse the added value of a life in the developed world. The financial cost alone has been estimated as a quarter million dollars per child.
And even if one considers the quality of life in the developed world to be so large so that one extra person living in the developed world is more important than hundreds of people in the developing world, to the extent that there are good existential risk reduction charities the calculation still comes out against having children (if the human race thrives in the future then our descendants will have much higher quality of life than people in the contemporary developed world).
Do you know about Giving What We Can? You may be interested in getting to know people in that community. Basically, it's a group of people that pledges to give 10% of their earnings to the most effective charities in the developing world. Feel free to PM me or reply if you want to know more.
I'm familiar with it. Thanks for checking!
While we live on a much smaller budget than many people, we still have disposable income that we could choose to spend on cryonics instead of other things. If cryonics cost $500/year you would still have $28/week in discretionary money after the cryonics spending. Whether this makes sense depends on whether you think that you would get more happiness out of cryonics or that $10/week. As for me, I need to read more about cryonics.
(Some background: As she wrote, julia is very unwilling to spend money on herself that could instead be going to helping other people. Because this leads to making yourself miserable, I decided to put $38/week into an account as a conditional gift, where the condition is that it can be spent on herself (or on gifts for people she knows personally) but not given away. So cryonics would not in our case actually mean less money given to charity.)
Irrelevant. My observation was adressed to an argument that those $300 would improve my own QoL.
"Hi, you have cancer. Want an experimental treatment? It works with >5% probability and costs $500/year." "No thanks, I'll die and give the money to charity."
Strangely enough, I don't hear that nearly as often as the one against cryonics. And it's even worse, because signing up for cryonics means more people will be able to (economies of scale, looks less weird, more people hear of it).
Not to mention that most charities suck. But VillageReach does qualify.
I don't think the 1 to 100 scale works; the scale should allow for negative numbers to accommodate some of the concepts that have been mentioned.For example, would you rather die at 50 years old, or live another decade while being constantly and pointlessly tortured, and then die?
It seems reasonable to assume that selection bias will work in our favor when considering the nature of the world in cases where the revival will work. This is debatable, but the debate shouldn't just be ignored.
Even assuming that your math is right, I'm having a hard time thinking of something that I could spend $300/year on that would give me a quality-of-life increase equivalent to 5% of the difference between the worse possible case (being tortured for a year) and the best possible case (being massively independently wealthy, having an awesome social life and plenty of interesting things to do with my time). I'd rate a week's vacation as less than 0.5% of the difference between those two, for example, and you can barely get plane tickets to somewhere interesting for $300.
Edit: Flubbed the math. Point still stands, but not as strongly as I originally thought.
For a single individual the cost is much more than $300. Alcor's website says membership is $478 annually, plus another $120 a year if you elect the stand-by option. Also you need $150K worth of life insurance, which will add a bit more.
Peanuts! You say...
I really don't see the point of signing up now, because I really don't see how you can avoid losing all the information in your mind to autolysis unless you get a standby or at least a very quick (within an hour or two) vitrification. That means I have to be in the right place, at the right time when I die and I simply don't think thats likely now - when any death I experience would almost certainly be sudden and it would be hours and hours before I'm vitrified.
I mean, if I get a disease and have some warning then sure I'll consider a move to Phoenix and pay them their $20k surcharge (about a lifetime's worth of dues anyway) and pay for the procedure in cash up-front. There is no reason for me to put money into dues now when the net present value of those payments exceeds the surcharge they charge if you are a "last minute" patient.
I understand this isn't an option if you don't have at least that much liquidity but since I happen to do so then it makes sense to me to keep it all (and future payments) under my control.
Hopefully that decision is a long time from now and I'll be more optimistic about the whole business at that time. I'll also have better picture of my overall financial outlook and whether I'd rather spend that money on my children's future than my doubtful one.
It's information, it doesn't need to be found in the same form that is necessary for normal brain's function. If there is something else correlated with the info in question, or some kind of residue from which it's possible to infer what was there before, it's enough. Also, concepts in the brain seem to be coded holographically, so even a bullet in the brain may be recoverable from.
(For the same reason, importance of vitrification seems overemphasised. I can't imagine information getting lost because of freezing damage. Of course, brain becomes broken, but info doesn't magically disappear because of that.)
Most cryonics literature concentrates on the possibility of direct bodily reanimation, not scanning and WBE.
jhuffman's point made me think of the following devil's advocacy: If someone is very confident of cryonics, say more than 99% confident, then they should have themselves preserved before death. They should really have themselves preserved immediately - otherwise there is a higher risk that they will die in a way that causes the destruction of their mind, than there is that cryonics will fail. The amount that they will be willing to pay would also be irrelevant - they won't need the money until after they are preserved. I appreciate that there are probably laws against preserving healthy adults, so this is strictly a thought experiment.
As people get older their risk of death or brain damage increases. This means that as someone gets older the confidence level at which they should seek early preservation will decrease. Also as someone gets older their expected "natural" survival time decreases, by definition. This means the payoff for not seeking early preservation is reducing all the time. This seems to bring some force to the argument - if there is a 10% probability that cryonics will succeed, then I really can't see why anyone would let themselves get within 6 years of likely death - they are putting a second lifetime at risk for 6 years of less and less healthy life.
Finally the confidence level relates to cost. If people can be shown to have a low level of confidence in cryonics, then their willingness to pay money should be lower. The figures I've seen quoted require a sum of $150,000. (Whether this is paid in life insurance or not is irrelevant - you must pay for it in the premium since, if you're going to keep the insurance until you die, the probability of the insurer paying out is 100%). If the probability of Cryonics working is 10%, then the average cost for a successful re-animation is $1.5 million. This is a pretty conservative cost I think - doubtless for some who read this blog it is small change. Not for me sadly though :)
I don't think anyone is that confident...at least I hope that they are not. Even if cryonics itself works there are so many other reasons revival would never happen; I outlined them near the bottom of the thread related to my original reply to this post already so I won't do so again. Suffice it to say, even if you had 100% confidence in both cryonics and future revival technology, you cannot have nearly 100% confidence in actually being revived.
But if you are young and healthy and want to be preserved intact you can probably figure out how to do it; but it is risky and you need to take precautions which I don't know the least thing about... The last thing you want is to end up under a scalpel on a medical examiner's table, which is what often happens to people who die suddenly or violently.
You're doing your argument an injustice by not linking to (or expounding on) a great reason why cryonics should work. In case you already have, well then, please could you just cite your prior work.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/wq/you_only_live_twice/
I was going to leave a comment simply stating:
"Eliezer Yudkowsky - the man who can make a blatantly off-topic post and be upvoted for it."
But it occurs to me I might be missing something, so explanation please.
Signing up for cryonics is kind of the textbook example of applied rationality around here, much as theism is the textbook example of applied irrationality, so I think it's interesting to know what kind of people did it, and why.
Quibble: "theism" itself isn't so much applied irrationality - that would be something more like wasting time at church, or buying lottery tickets - an action with a tangible cost.
There's a final filter in rationality where you take your ideas seriously, and a critical sub-filter is where you're willing to take ideas seriously even though the people around you don't.
Going to a group where cryonics was normal was a shift of perspective even for me, and here I thought I had conformity beat. It was what caused me to realize - no, parents who don't sign their kids up for cryonics really are doing something inexcusable; the mistake is not inevitable, it's just them.
I blame the education system.
Actually, I believe the question was "would you not describe yourself as athiest/agnostic" rather than "identify as" which is a very different question.
I’ve mentioned already in comments to this post that parents don’t have access to cryonics. I would like to describe in more detail what I mean by ‘access’. I think that childless adults often don’t realize the extent to which parents depend upon embedded social structures, though I’m sure they’ve noticed things like children’s menus, stroller parking stations and priority airplane seating. (One of my worst experiences as a parent was spending 14 hours with an 11 month old in Chicago-O’Hare ...)
Access certainly includes affordability. $300 per year is what it might minimally cost for one person. If it scales linearly and you have 3 kids, that would be $1,500 per year to cover the whole family. Consider that many families are struggling to cover health insurance or save for college tuition, and have already relinquished all but very occasional movies and dinners out.
Also, access includes general societal acceptance and a certain level of background participation.
I depend upon society to help me explore what the ethical issues are so that I can make up my own mind in an informed way. I’m not an ethicist or a pastor, I’ve specialized in a different area.
If there is a certain level of background participation, I can possibly count on any number of aunts and uncles and grandparents and godparents to sign up, in the case that my husband and I can’t be preserved at all or resuscitated as early as our child. (For example, my child might die of leukemia that they have a cure for in 100 years, but my husband might die of a cancer they don’t have a cure for for 150 years, and I might die of brain degeneration that makes it impossible to ever revive me.)
Placing a child in cryonics may ostracize a grieving parent from important components of community support. Without informed consideration of the issues and a collection of common experiences, society won’t know how to help the parents of a cryonically preserved child grieve. Even if you believe the child has a good chance of being revived, the parent still needs to come to terms with the terrible pain of not being able to care for their child every day anymore. When they’re reunited, the parent may have only a vague memory of their child. So an example of societal cryonics infrastructure would be the option of freezing a healthy parent with their child, if they choose to.
Access also includes the same elements that are of concern to childless adults – proximity to a large airport, access to hospitals that know about cryonics and that are willing to comply with initial steps, access to an ambulance that comes prepared with a big vat of ice.
Can you imagine a grieving parent, at the sight of the wreck, trying to arrange for someone to go to a grocery store and buy a bucket and 12 bags of ice?
One last remark about “access”. What happens once cryonics is more commonplace? Perhaps 1% of the population is signing up for cryonics and societal norms shift over a couple years. Certainly this number would rise to well above 75%. Could cryonics companies keep up with the 7000 people that die per day in the U.S, 2.5 million per year? How many billions of people will be cryo-preserved before revival is possible? Perhaps these are trivial issues, I don’t know, but they are nevertheless relevant to whether there is any real access to the 150 million parents in the US.
Eventually it might be easy, painless, and cheap for parents to save their children's lives. The more people sign up for cryonics, the closer we get to that world.
Meanwhile, though, we don't live in that world, and for now, only parents who actually care about their children's lives will bother.
See also: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/08/pick-one-sick-kids-or-look-poor.html
I've lived with families in third and second world countries, as a guest, and have my own and different ideas about this story. For example, depending upon some economic and cultural variables, it could be more likely that they don't fully trust Western solutions and didn't want to appear uppity or as though they were rejecting their native societal support structure, which they depend upon. Still, I wouldn't assert that anything is the case without actually talking to a Bolivian family. Doesn't it matter what they think of their experience?
Likewise, by insisting that it's a cut-and-dry, settled issue, you missed an opportunity at your conference to ask the couple with the kids how they overcame their initial qualms, if any, and what advice they would give to other parents thinking about cryonics. I think that I would have gotten along with this couple and after speaking together for a few minutes, neither one of us would have walked away thinking that the other set of parents were 'bad parents'.
Forgive my ignorance, but aren't the real costs of cryonics much higher than their nominal fees, given the need to ensure that the preserved are financially secure post re-animation? What is the relative utility of perhaps having the chance of being re-animated as compared to not having a poor lifestyle (i.e. "going to the movies or eating at nice restaurants") now?
My estimate of the probabilities involved in calculating the payoff from cryonics differs from your estimates. I do not think it follows that I am a bad parent.
Suppose your child dies. Afterward, everyone alive at the time of a Friendly intelligence explosion plus the tiny handful signed up for cryonics, live happily ever after. Would you say in retrospect that you'd been a bad parent, or would you plead that, in retrospect, you made the best possible decision given the information that you had?
After all, your child could die in a car crash on a shopping trip, and yet taking them along on that shopping trip could still have been the best possible choice given the statistical information that you had. Is that the plea you would make in the above event? What probabilities do you assign?
Suppose your child dies. Afterward, everyone alive at the time of an unFriendly intelligence explosion plus the tiny handful signed up for cryonics (including your child), also dies. Would you say in retrospect that you'd been a bad parent, or would you plead that, in retrospect, you made the best possible decision given the information that you had?
I, personally, will allocate any resources that I would otherwise use for cryonics to the prevention of existential risks.
I have no child; this is not coincidence. If I did have a kid you can damn well better believe that kid would be signed up for cryonics or I wouldn't be able to sleep.
I'll accept that excuse for your not being signed up yourself - though I'm rather skeptical until I see the donation receipt. I will not accept that excuse for your child not being signed up. I'll accept it as an excuse for not having a child, but not as an excuse for having a child and then not signing them up for cryonics. Take it out of the movie budget, not the existential risks budget.
I don't believe in excuses, I believe that signing up for cryonics is less rational than donating to prevent existential risks. For somewhat related reasons, I do not intend to have children.
Sounds like you could be in a consistent state of heroism, then. May I ask to which existential risk(s) you are currently donating?
I'm in the "amassing resources" phase at present. Part of the reason I'm on this site is to try and find out what organizations are worth donating to.
I am in no way a hero. I'm just a guy who did the math, and at least part of my motivation is selfish anyway.
I reject your framing. I would say that I had made a bad mistake. Errors do not a bad parent make. Or, to put it another way, suppose you woke up in the Christian Hell; would you plead that you had made the best decision on the available information? Scary what-ifs are no argument. You cannot make me reconsider a probability assignment by pointing out the bad consequences if my assessment is wrong; you can only do so by adding information. I understand that you believe you're trying to save my life, but please be aware that turning to the Dark Side to do so is not likely to impress me; if you need the power of the Dark Side, how good can your argument be, anyway?
The brain's functioning depends on electric and chemical potentials internal to the cells as well as connections between the cells. I believe that cryonics can maintain the network, but not the internal state of the nodes; consequently I assign "too low to meaningfully consider" to the probability of restoring my personality from my frozen brain. If the technology improves, I will reconsider.
Edit: I should specify that right now I have no children, lest I be misunderstood. It seems quite possible I will have some in the near future, though.
Predictable errors do.
Hell yes.
One way of assessing probabilities is to ask how indignant we have a right to be if reality contradicts us. I would be really indignant if contradicted by reality about Christianity being correct. How indignant would you be if Reality comes back and says, "Sorry, cryonics worked"? My understanding is that dogs have been cooled to the point of cessation of brain activity and revived with no detected loss of memory, though I'd have to look up the reference... if that will actually convince you to sign up for cryonics; otherwise, please state your true rejection.
I don't think this is really the issue. If I make a bet in poker believing (correctly given the available information) that the odds are in my favour but I go on to lose the hand I am not indignant - I was perfectly aware I was taking a calculated risk. In retrospect I should have folded but I still made the right decision at the time. Making the best decision given the available information doesn't mean making the retrospectively correct decision.
I haven't yet reached the point where cryonics crosses my risk/reward threshold. It is on my list of 'things to keep an eye on and potentially change my position in light of new information' however.
If even a percent or two of parents didn't make predictable errors we would have probably reached a Friendly Singularity ages ago. That's a very high standard. If only parents who met it reproduced the species would rapidly have gone extinct.
This might get me blasted off the face of the Internet, but by my (admittedly primitive) calculations, there is a >95% chance that I will live to see the end of the world as we know it, whether that be a positive or negative end. I do not see any reason to sign up for cryonics, as it will merely constitute a drain on my currently available resources with no tangible benefit. I am further unconvinced that cryonics is a legitimate industry. I am, of course, open to argument, but I really can't see cryonics as something that would rationally inspire this sort of reaction.
I see a disturbing surface similarity.
"If you don't teach your children the One True Religion, you're a lousy parent."
My own excuse for not signing up for cryonics is not that I don't think it will work, it's that I don't particularly value my own existence. I'm much more concerned about the effects of my death on other people than its effects on me; I've resolved not to die before my parents do, because I don't want them to suffer the grief my death would cause.
Incidentally, is it possible to sign someone else up for cryonics, if they don't object?
"If you don't teach your children the One True Religion, you're a lousy parent."
Given that the One True Religion is actually correct, wouldn't you, in fact, be a lousy parent if you did not teach it? Someone who claims to be a Christian and yet doesn't teach their kids about Christianity is, under their incorrect belief system, condemning them to an eternity of torture, which surely qualifies as being a lousy parent in my book.
It seems obvious to me that if cryonics companies wanted more people to sign up, all they'd need to do is advertise a little. An ad compaign quelling top 10 parent fears would probably start causing people to sign up in droves. However, they remain quite quiet so I do assume that there's some kind techno-elitist thing going on ... they don't want everyone signing up.
Doesn't, um, thinking about that for like 30 seconds tell you how unlikely it is?
Not advertising is a clear signal. If any company wants the masses, they advertise to the masses. If Proctor & Gamble comes out with a great new detergent, they're not going to wait for people to do the research and find out about them.
The more I think about it the more likely it seems... So: finding out about them is the first barrier to entry.
A clear signal that cryonics companies don't have an advertising budget?
Do you know why cryonics is not more heavily advertised? Thinking about it for 30 seconds gives me some hypotheses but I'm too socially distant to make a reliable guess.
I like the mockery explanation. Cryonics is as about as socially acceptable as furry fandom; if furries scraped up a few millions for some TV spots, do you think they would get more or less members in the long run? There is such a thing as bad publicity.
And existing cryonics members might be exasperated - money used for advertising is money not used for research or long-term sustainability (I hear Alcor runs at a loss).
This is a myth. Techno-filia is very much part of our culture. Science fiction dominates our movies. People would scramble to sign up for cryonics if the infrastructure was there and they were certain it wasn't a scam. But that's a big IF. And that's the IF -- this idea of parents not choosing cryonics because they're lousy parents is a huge MYTH invented right on the spot. Parents don't have access to cryonics.
(If a cryonics company is reading this: I do suggest an ad campaign. I think the image you project should be 'safe household product': something completely established and solid that people can sign up for and sign out of easily -- just a basic, mundane service. No complications and lots of options. People aren't signing they're life away, they're buying a service. And it's just suspension till a later date -- I'd stay well clear of any utopian pseudo-religious stuff.)
I'm inclined to believe this number is a lie, as I refuse to believe you are stupid enough to make mistakes of this order of magnitude.
The claimed $180/year (claimed $300 figure minus membership costs) * 50 or so more years people will live only gives $9k. Safe investment gives you barely enough to keep up with inflation, so you cannot use exponential growth argument.
Real costs are around $100k-$200k reference.
Real life insurance costs increase drastically as you age, and as your chance of death increases. Surely you must know that. If you paid the same amount of money each year, you'd need to pay $2k-$5k depending on your cryonics provider and insurance company overhead.
What will very likely happen is people paying for life insurance, then finding out at age of 70 that their life insurance costs increase so much that they cannot afford it any more, and so they won't see any cryonics even though they paid big money all their lives for it. (Not that chances of cryonics working are significant enough for it to make much difference).
My current life insurance policy is what is called "term life insurance". It is good for a term of 20 years.
The payout if I die within those 20 years is $500,000.
My monthly premium is $40 for that whole 20 years.
You can get an instant online quote here. You don't have to put in real name and email address.
Even assuming best health class - something which won't happen as you age.
In other words, this is exactly what I was talking about - it's a big fat lie to pretend your premium won't change as you age.
Term life insurance is not the only type available. Most people who get term life insurance plan on having enough money saved up by the time the term runs out. Whole life insurance has no change in premium for the entire lifetime of the insured.
I'm 32. I fit in the "Preferred" health group. 30 year term life insurance with a 100k payout is 168/year as per the quotes page I provided above.
As AngryParsley mentions, if you purchase term life insurance you're planing on having savings to cover your needs after your policy expires. This is my plan.
However, I suppose in say 15 years, I could purchase another 30 year/100k term insurance policy. Let's say I slip a category to "Standard Plus".
My premium will be 550/year. That of course assumes I didn't save anything during those 15 years (not to mention the remaining 15 years in the original policy) and need a 100k policy.
I am applauding this article. You have moved me. I am A-2561 neuro and I'm proud to be a member of Alcor. I am 16 years old. I got into the field myself when I watched Dr. De Grey's documentary Do You Want To Live Forever. I am unbelievably lucky. The average American has a better chance of being an A-list celebrity than being a cryonicist. As Mike Perry said; Cryonicists are born, not made. When I watched it, something just clicked and I decided to devote my life to it. A lousy parent also doesn't get memberships for the pets of their children. Cupcake and Snugglemuffins have memberships because I begged my parents to get it for them. No child should see their dog rot in the ground followed by the 'Heaven' story that we've had shoved at us for thousands of years.
I want to downvote you for naming a pet "snugglemuffins", but that would probably be an abuse of the system. :-)
"If you don't sign up your kids for cryonics then you are a lousy parent. If you aren't choosing between textbooks and food, then you can afford to sign up your kids for cryonics."
This is flat-out classism. The fact is, the only reason I'm not choosing between textbooks or food is that the US government has deemed me poor enough to qualify for government grant money for my higher education. And even that doesn't leave me with enough money to afford a nice place to live AND a car with functioning turn signals AND quality day-care for my child while I'm at work AND health insurance for myself.
Shaming parents into considering cryonics is a low blow indeed. Instead of sneering at those of us who cannot be supermom/dad, why not spend your time preparing a persuasive case for the scientific community to push for a government-sponsored cryonics program? Otherwise the future will be full of those lucky enough to be born into privileged society: the Caucasian, white-collar, English-speaking segment of the population, and little else. What a bland vision for humanity.
Then why did you have a kid? The consequences of an action are the same regardless of the circumstances in which it occurred. If you knew that you couldn't afford to prevent your child's death why did you have one at all? It isn't classist at all to say "don't live beyond your means." Is it acceptable for the father in the ghetto to beat his child to death, because he's too poor to afford a psychologist? Is it acceptable for a single parent to drive drunk with their child because they're too poor to afford a baby sitter or a cab fare when they want to drink? Eliezer said that he doesn't have children consciously so as not to expose them to the enormous risk and endemic suffering that life today means.
And to your last paragraph, there are better things to spend time, money and energy doing, especially given the absolute impossibility of convincing even 26% of the population to go for it.
Response voted up in the hopes that it shames comfortable middle-class parents into signing up their kids for cryonics. Which will, if enough people do it, make cryonics cheaper even if there is no government program. Or eventually get a private charity started to help make it affordable, which is far more likely than a government program, though still unlikely.
Are they going to keep having this conference? $300 a year seems like an outright bargain if I get a free trip to Florida every year out of it.
A question for Eliezer and anyone else with an opinion: what is your probability estimate of cryonics working? Why? An actual number is important, since otherwise cryonics is an instance of pascal's mugging. "Well, it's infinitely more than zero and you can multiply it by infinity if it does work" doesn't cut it for me. Since I place the probability of a positive singularity diminishingly small (p<0.0001), I don't see a point in wasting the money I could be enjoying now on lottery tickets or spending the social capital and energy on something that will make me seem insane.
My estimate of the core technology working would be "it simply looks like it should work", which in terms of calibration should probably go to 90% or 80% or something like that.
Estimates of cryonics organizations staying alive are outside the range of my comparative advantage in predictions, but I'll note that I tend to think in terms of them staying around for 30 years, not 300 years.
The weakest link in the chain is humankind's overall probability of surviving. This is generally something I've refused to put a number on, with the excuse that I don't know how to estimate the probability of doing the "impossible" - though for those who insist on using silly reference classes, I should note that my success rate on the AI-Box Experiment is 60%. (It's at least possible, though, that once you're frozen, you would have no way of noticing all the Everett branches where you died - there wouldn't be anyone who experienced that death.)
Well, I look at it this way:
I place the odds of humans actually being able to resuspend a frozen corpse near zero.
Therefore, in order for cryonics to work, we would need some form of information capture technology that would scan the in tact frozen brain and model the synaptic information in a form that could be 'played.' This is equivalent to the technology needed for uploading.
Given the complicated nature of whole brain simulations, some form of 'easier' quick and dirty AI is vastly more likely to come into being before this could take place.
I place the odds of this AI being friendly near zero. This might be where our calculations diverge.
In terms of 'evertt branches', one can never 'experience' being dead, so if we're going to go that route, we might as well say that we all live on in some branch where FAI was developed in time to save us... needless to say, this gets a bit silly as an argument for real decisions.
By default AI isn't friendly, but independent of SIAI succeeding does it really make sense to have 99% confidence in humanity as a whole not doing a given thing which is critical for our survival correctly or in FAI being impossibly difficult not merely for humans but for the gradually enhanced transhumans which humanity could technologically self-modify into if we don't wipe ourselves out? If we knew how to cheaply synthetically create 'clicks' of the type discussed in this post we would already have the tech to avoid UFAI indefinitely, enabling massive self-enhancement prior to work on FAI.
I actually did reflect after posting that my probability estimate was 'overconfident,' but since I don't mind being embarrassed if I'm wrong, I'm placing it at where I actually believe it to be. Many posts on this blog have been dedicated to explaining how completely difficult the task of FAI is and how few people are capable of making meaningful contributions to the problem. There seems to be a panoply of ways for things to go horribly wrong in even minute ways. I think 1 in 10,000, or even 1 in a million is being generous enough with the odds that the problem is still worth looking at (given what's at stake). Perhaps you have a problem with the mind-set of low probabilities, like it's pessimistic and self-defeating? Also, do you really believe uploading could occur before AI?
I would be very surprised if uploading was easier than AI, maybe slightly more surprised than I would be by cold fusion being real, but with the sort of broad probabilities I use that's still a bit over 1%. AGI is terribly difficult too. It's not FAI or uploading but very high caliber people have failed over and over.
The status quo points to AGI before FAI, but the status quo continually changes, both due to trends and due to radical surprises. The world wouldn't have to change more radically than it has numerous times in the past for the sanity waterline to rise far enough that people capable of making significant progress towards AGI reliably understood that they needed to aim for FAI or for uploading instead. Once Newton could unsurprisingly be a Christian theist and an Alchemist. By the mid 20th century the priors against Einstein being a theist were phenomenal and in fact he wasn't one. (his Spinozaism is closer to what we call atheism than what most people call atheism is). I don't think that extreme low probabilities are self defeating to me, though they might be for some people, I just disagree with them.
Who are the people capable of making significant progress on AGI who aren't already aware of (and indeed working on) FAI? My impression was that the really smart "MIT-type" AI people were basically all working on narrow AI.
Your argument is interesting, but I'm not sure if you arrived at your 1% estimate by specific reasoning about uploading/AI, or by simply arguing that paradigmatic 'surprises' occur frequently enough that we should never assign more than a 99% chance to something (theoretically possible) not happening.
I can conceive of many possible worlds (given AGI does not occur) in which the individual technologies needed to achieve uploading are all in place, and yet are never put together for that purpose due to general human revulsion. I can also conceive of global-political reasons that will throw a wrench in tech-development in general. Should I assign each of those a 1% probability just because they are possible?
Also, no offense meant to you or anyone else here, but I frequently wonder how much bias there is in this in-group of people who like to think about uploading/FAI towards believing that it will actually occur. It's a difficult thing to gage, since it seems the people best qualified to answer questions about these topics are the ones most excited/invested in the positive outcomes. I mean, if someone looks at the evidence and becomes convinced that the situation is hopeless, they are much less likely to get involved in bringing about a positive outcome and more likely to rationalize all this away as either crazy or likely to occur so far in the future that it won't bother them. Where do you go for an outside view?
Paradigmatic surprises vary a lot in how dramatic they are. X-rays and double slit deserved WAY lower probabilities than 1%. I'm basically going on how convincing I find the arguments for uploading first and trying to maintain calibrated confidence intervals. I would not bet 99:1 against uploading happening first. I would bet 9:1 without qualm. I would probably bet 49:1 I find it very easy to tell personally credible stories (no outlandish steps) where uploading happens first for good reasons. The probability of any of those stories happening may be much less than 1%, but they probably constitute exemplars of a large class.
Assigning a 1% probability to uploading not happening in a given decade when it could happen, due to politics and/or revulsion, seems much too low. Decade-to-decade correlations could be pretty high but not plausibly near 1, so given civilization's long term survival uploading is inevitable once the required tech is in place, but it's silly to assume civilization's long-term survival.
I don't really think that outside views are that widely applicable a methodology and if there isn't an obvious place to look for one there probably isn't one. The buck for judgment and decision-making has to stop somewhere, and stopping with deciding on reference classes seems silly in most situations. That said, I share your concern. I'm sure that there is a bias in the community of interested people, but I think that the community's most careful thinkers can and do largely avoid it. I certainly think bad outcomes are more likely than good ones, but I think that the odds are around 2:1 rather than 100:1.
I'd be interested in seeing your reasoning written out in a top-level post. 2:1 seems beyond optimistic to me, especially if you give AI before uploading 9:1, but I'm sure you have your reasons. Explaining a few of these 'personally credible stories,' and what classes you place them in such that they sum to 10% total may be helpful. This goes for why you think FAI has such a high chance or succeeding as well.
Also, I believe I used the phrase 'outside view' incorrectly, since I didn't mean reference classes. I was interested to know if there are people who are not part of your community that help you with number crunching on the tech-side. An 'unbiased' source of probabilities, if you will.
I think of my community as essentially consisting of the people who are willing to do this sort of analysis, so almost axiomatically no.
The simplest reason for thinking that FAI is (relatively) likely to succeed is the same reason for thinking that slavery ending or world peace are more likely than one might assume from psychology or from economics, namely that people who think about them are unusually motivated to try to bring them about.
I think that was probably the greatest single surprise in the entire history of time.
Outside of pure math at least. Irrational numbers were a big deal.
Do you mean "easier than AGI"? Why? With enough computing power, the hardest thing to do would probably be to supply the sensory inputs and do something useful with the motor outputs. With destructive uploading you don't even need nanotech. It doesn't seem like it requires any incredible new insights into the brain or intelligence in general.
If you want to learn more about WBE and the challenges ahead, this is probably the best place to start:
Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap by Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg
Uploading is likely to require a lot of basic science, though not the depth of insight required for AGI. That same science will also make AGI much easier while most progress towards AGI contributes less though not nothing to uploading.
With all the science done there is still a HUGE engineering project. Engineering is done in near mode but very easy to talk about in far mode. People hand-wave the details and assume that it's a matter of throwing money at a problem, but large technically demanding engineering projects fail or are greatly delayed all the time even if they have money and large novel projects have a great deal of difficulty attracting large amounts of funding.
GOFAI is like trying to fly by flapping giant bird wings with your arms. Magical thinking.
Evolutionary approaches to AI are like platinum jet-packs. Simple, easy to make, inordinately expensive and stupidly hard to control.
Uploading is like building a bird from scratch. It would Definitely work really well if people could just get all the bugs out, but it's a big, complicated, insanely expensive, and judging by history there will be lots of bugs.
Neuromorphic AI is like trying to build a bird while looking for insights and then building an airplane when you understand how birds work.
FAI is like trying to build a floating magnetic airship. It sounds casually like something that is significantly more likely to be possible than not but we have very little idea in practice how its done, nothing in nature to imitate, and no promise that the necessary high-level insights required to pull it off are humanly achievable. OTOH, since we haven't looked very hard as a species, we also have no good reason to think they aren't so it basically falls to your priors.
I think the primary point overlooked when thinking about uploads is that there are milestones along the way that will greatly increase funding and overall motivation. I'm confident that if a rough mouse brain could be uploaded then the response from governments and the private sector would be tremendous. There are plenty of smart people and organizations in the world that would understand the potential of human uploads once basic feasibility had been demonstrated. The engineering project would still be daunting, of course, but the economic incentive would plainly be seen as the greatest in history.
Sorry, but with today's industry and government sectors I don't buy it. Not for uploads, not for aging. This awareness already happened with MNT, but it didn't have the effect in question.
I think that's why Vassar is betting on AGI: it requires insight, but the rest of the necessary technology is already here. Uploading requires an engineering project involving advances in cryobiology, ultramicrotomes, scanning electron microscopes, and computer processors. There's no need for new insight, but the required technology advances are significant.
OP upvoted for displaying emotions that fit the facts.
Eliezer--don't know how many people reading this had the same response I did, but you tore my heart out.
As Nick Bostrom Ph.D. Director of the Oxford Future of Humanity institute, Co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association said about my book "21st Century Kids" "Childhood should be fun and so should the future. Read this to your children, and next you know they'll demand a cryonics contract for Christmas."
You know, I do what I can to educate others to the fact that cryonics is possible, and thus there is the common sense obligation to try. For me it is a noble endeavor that humans are attempting, I'm proud to help that effort. If you do a search on "teaching kids cryonics" you'll get: http://www.depressedmetabolism.com/2008/07/04/teaching-children-about-cryonics/ from a few years ago. I still do classes when I can, I've been talking to my children's friends and parents here in the UK after moving from Austin this past summer. The reception I get over here from parents and kids is generally the same as what I heard in the States--people express interest, but never really go through the effort of signing up.
I will be writing more, in the mean time I love hearing from fans of http://www.amazon.com/21st-Century-Kids-Shannon-Vyff/dp/1886057001 It was a thrill to get pictures and feedback from kids who got the book this Christmas and loved it!
Thank you for writing about the Teens & Twenties conference Eliezer, I sincerely look forward to further analysis from you. I'll be attending with my teens in the future, my 13 year old daughter actually had wanted to go this year but we were not able to work it in. She'll be more mature, and my son will be a teen by the time the next event occurs. It is great to have the heroes who have devoted their lives to cryoncis, meet the "normal folk" who sign up--and for the kids to make friends with other cryonicists.
I'm sorry about your brother Eliezier, your writing tore my heart out. I agree that parents should sign their kids up, my own were raised with it and plan on "talking their spouse" into doing it (that will be interesting ;-) ). I've seen other older cryonicists who have raised their kids with cryonics, and the kids kept up the arrangements. I've also seen it go the other way. We need more books written for kids :-)
Thanks for all you do.
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?
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.
Maybe you could specify that you only want to be revived if some of your friends are alive.
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'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. ;)
I find it rather odd that no one has answered the original question.
I'm signed up, and I'll be your friend.
I thought this was rather tasteful media coverage: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/8691489/Robert-Ettinger-the-father-of-cryonics-is-gone-for-now.html
Very positive too. Hard to ask for more favorable coverage than that.
Maybe too favorable, given that the author does not question the time frame of only decades until revival.
Since learning, from Less Wrong, of Alcor and vitrification tech and such, I seriously considered cryonics for the first time in my life and really it was obvious. However slim, it is an actual chance to live beyond the meager handful of decades we get naturally, an actual chance to not die, and in the world as it is today, the only option. Even if the chance of it actually working as advertised (waking up after however long with a brand new perfectly healthy youthful nanotechnologically-grown immortal body) is vanishingly tiny, it is still the optimal action in today's world, is it not?
I should mention that (despite my efforts to hack it out of myself) I have a powerful neurotic phobia of medication, mind-altering substances, surgeries, and basically anything past or current technology can do to a human body that leaves traces, however beneficial. The idea of my still-active brain being pumped full of cryoprotectant upon my heart's last beat is more subjectively disturbing to me than eating flesh cut from my own body.
And I fully intend to sign up anyway.
(I'm currently living on a fixed income that has me occasionally going hungry in order to keep myself in air conditioning and internet, or I would have signed up already.)
The thing is, I want to convince my dad to sign himself up as well, and I think punctuating with this article, if presented in the proper context, could go a long way towards convincing him to sign us up all at once if I can just get passed his excessive skepticism. I'm not at all confident in my ability to sell him on it, though, so are there any good arguments to use when your primary obstacle is the other person's deep-seated irrational pride in their own skepticism? He could easily afford it, and he already lives in Arizona. I know he would totally go for it if I could just find a way to get passed his initial dismissal of it (a decade ago) as false hope for gullible cowards. I think he's been numbing himself to his mortality, and accepting the existence of a genuine hope against death would be difficult because it dispels the numbness. (This might even be why the majority of otherwise-sane people dismiss cryonics out of hand now that I think of it: for some, accepting a tenuous hope is more painful than having no hope at all.)
I'd appreciate any good advice on how to present my case to him, if anyone has any insights.
Am I the only one who thinks it is far more likely that the institution will fail than that the technology is never developed or is never applied?
Corporations, nation-states - few things have lasted hundreds of years with their cores intact. Laws change, market prices of commodities change, wars happen. The United States is not immune.
Concur. I am moderately confident that cryonics will eventually be a viable technology, assuming normal conditions-- but I am very much not confident that Alcor and the like will live to see that day.
Maybe we can vitrify them?
I wish you the best of luck in signing up, and persuading your dad to. I think that the technical plausibility of cryonics (not "cyronics" btw) is much higher than you seem to imply here, incidentally - I'd put it over 50%.
I've written a 2000 word blog article on my efforts to find the best anti-cryonics writing I can:
A survey of anti-cryonics writing
Edit: now a top level article
An excellent post.
I have one issue, though. It may be poor form to alter your opening paragraph at this stage, Paul, but I'd appreciate it if you did. While it makes a very good 'hook' for those of us inclined to take cryonics seriously, it means that posting a link for other friends (as I'd otherwise do) will have the opposite effect than it should. (I am fairly sure that a person inclined to be suspicious of cryonics would read the first few lines only, departing in the knowledge that their suspicions were confirmed.)
An introduction that is at first glance equivocal would be a great improvement over one that is at first glance committed to the anti-cryonics viewpoint, for that reason.
Top-level post it
Me too. This is not just about cryonics. It is not remotely just about cryonics. It is about the general quality of published argument that you can expect to find against a true contrarian idea, as opposed to a false contrarian idea.
I now want to go and look for the pre-chemistry arguments against alchemy.
I don't think that cryonics is inherently wrong, but equally I don't think we have a theory or language of identity and mind sufficiently advanced to refute it.
You know, I did a lot of reading about alchemy when I was younger, and when I try to think back to contemporary criticisms (and there was a lot, alchemy was very disreputable), they all seem to boil down to 1) no alchemists have yet succeeded despite lavish funding, and they are all either failures or outright conmen like Casanova; and 2) alchemical immortality is overreaching and against God.
#1 is pretty convincing but not directly applicable (cryonics since the 1970s has met its self-defined goal of keeping patients cold); #2 strikes me as false, but I also regard the similar anti-cryonics arguments as false.
I've posted a link to my blog at the moment; do you think it's better that the entire article be included here?
yep
Here's an audio interview from 5 days ago with Ben Best, the president of the Cryonics Institute:
http://itsrainmakingtime.com/2010/cryonics/
I'm trying to avoid confirmation bias on this one, and I'm asking everywhere I can for links to the best anti-cryonics writing online. Thanks!
I'm still so baffled by this post.
Eliezer, do you like human beings? As they are, or do you want to change them?
Please: recognize the motive in asking this question, and give me a square answer.
http://books.google.com/books?id=MK0-GY5Ak7MC&pg=PA88&lpg=PA88&dq=%22sock+full+of%22+%22ozy+and+millie%22&source=bl&ots=f0DznsbBEK&sig=oXYyvFEDclrOajLIz7kdKI6oC0k&hl=en&ei=GGNaS-exFISksgPps6zMBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=&f=false
Second comic from the top.
Backup link: http://dergeis.livejournal.com/319819.html
Original link: http://www.ozyandmillie.org/d/20030324.html
I'm rather the opposite. My feelings can best be summed up by a Pirates of Penzance quote rather than a webcomic:
(In other words: "I love humanity. It's people I can't stand." - Linus van Pelt)?
There's no question that Eliezer wants humans to change. But he wants them to change in accordance with a coherent extrapolation of their values as they are now.
I have found this article which is about the same event (they even mention Eliezer as "an authority in the field of artificial intelligence"):
http://www.immortalhumans.com/what-type-of-personality-thinks-immortality-is-possible/
OK, here's a rationality test.
To test in some measure if your assumptions and hypothesis about cryonics are calibrated, how many people do you estimate were cryono-preserved at Alcor in 2009? (Don't look! And don't answer if you already know or knew for 2008 or another recent year.)
Later edit: The number of people who signed up for cryonics in 2009 is available as well if you want to estimate that too.
If you want, provide your estimate and something about your calculation.
Normal distribution, truncated at zero ... mean 10, standard deviation 50.
And that's ten and fifty I mean, not one hundred or five.
Edit: Justification is a sense that there are less than 1e4 people on ice so far, suspected to be based on flipping past such a statistic on a webpage without consciously reading. Expect number of people signed up is between twice and thirty times number stored.
Edit mk. 2: Or between zero and twenty, whichever is greater.
Edit mk. 3: I have now checked my numbers. ...Interesting.
Can anyone post a comparison of the services, (and other pros and cons) between Alcor and CI?
What are the arguments for either? Paying something like 2X price for a similar looking service implies that there should be a difference in the quality of service, perhaps the quality of the cryopreservation procedure. Maybe the most important one is the financial health of the company: the probability that they manage to exist long enough.
There's some information here.
Alcor takes care of standby (they'll send a team to camp out at your deathbed) and transportation. CI requires contracting with Suspended Animation for that level of care. Alcor invests more money per patient to fund liquid nitrogen and other maintenance expenses. ($25,000 for neuros and $65,000 for whole body)
On the other hand, CI keeps a relatively low profile while Alcor doesn't.
Thanks for the effort!
Of course I came to the above link and also to CI's comparison page, still it would be nice to see some independent review of both companies. Especially on the financial prospects.
The information on trust is interesting. Does it mean that Alcor patients have a safer future in case the operation of Alcor is endangered?
What I found strange is that Alcor advertises itself as the only company using "perfusion technology" whatever it means as opposed to CI, whereas CI also insists on using the "best techniques currently available" and cites the same paper as Alcor. It is definitely unclear. The only clear dinstinction seems to be that Alcor uses full body vitrification if a premium is payed. Still, the price difference between 88K and 35K are staggering, even if the transportation/suspension costs are taken into account.
Curiously -- not indignantly -- how should I interpret your statement that all but a handful of parents are "lousy"? Does this mean that your values are different from theirs? This might be what is usually meant when someone says someone is "lousy".
Your explicit argument seems to be that they're selfish if they're purchasing fleeting entertainment when they could invest that money in cryonics for their children. However, if they don't buy cryonics for themselves, either, it seems like cryonics is something they don't value, not that they're too selfish to buy it for their children.
Eliezer is criticizing parents who in principle think that cryonics is a good thing, but don't get it for their children, whether or not they get it for themselves.
My guess is that such parents are much more common than parents who buy it for themselves but not for their children, just because "thinking that cryonics is good in principle" is much more common than actually buying it for yourself.
Exactly. If a parent doesn't think cryonics makes sense, then they wouldn't get it for their kids anyways. Eliezer's statement can only criticize parents who get cryonics for themselves but not their children. This is a small group, and I assume it is not the one he was targeting.
Wow, the opposition I'm getting in my blog for suggesting this! (No link, because I want to avoid a pile-on). Still, two friends say they're also considering it. Will push :-)
January 21, 2010
Eliezer Yudkowsky writes (in Normal Cryonics):
Comment: there’s that, but if that was all it was, it wouldn’t be harder than doing your own income taxes by hand. A lot more people manage that, than do atheists who can afford it manage to sign up for cryonics.
So what’s the problem? A major one is what I might term the “creep factor.” Even if you have no fears of being alone in the future, or being experimented upon by denizens of the future, there’s still the problem that you have to think about your own physical mortality in a very concrete way. A way which requires choices, for hours and perhaps even days.
And they aren’t comforting choices, either, such as planning your own funeral. The conventional funeral is an event where you can imagine yourself in a comfortable nice casket, surrounded by people either eulogizing you, or kicking themselves because they weren’t nicer to you while you were alive. These thoughts may comfort those contemplating suicide, but they don’t comfort cryonicists.
No, you won’t be in any slumber-chamber. Instead they’ll cut your head off and it will push up bubbles, not daisies. At the very least they’ll fill your vessels with cold dehydrating solution and you’ll end up upside down and naked at 321 F. below zero, like some shriveled up old vampire.
Will you feel any of this? No. Is it any more gruesome than the alternatives of skeletonizing in a flame, or by slow decay? No. But the average person manages to mostly avoid thinking of the alternatives, and the funeral industry helps them do it. But there’s no avoiding thinking hard about this nitty-gritty physical death stuff, when you sign up for cryonics.
There’s even some primal primate fear involved, something like the fear of snakes. Except that cryonics taps into fears about being alone and alienated in the future, along with primal fears of decapitation (monkeys hate seeing monkey parts, particularly monkey heads). My illustration of the power of these memes is Washington Irving’s short stories: out of the very many he wrote, only two are now remembered, and yet, at the same time, remarkably almost everyone knows those two. They are Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. There’s a reason for this.
The psychological factors can surprise the most dyed-in-the-wool atheists who have experience with death. I myself came to cryonics as a physician, already having spent most of a year dissecting corpses, and later seeing much real-time dying. It didn’t completely fix the problem of my own physical mortality. When I came to actually signing up for cryonics, already having been convinced of it for some time, I felt significant psychological resistance, even so. There’s a difference between what you know intellectually and what your gut tells you. Cryonics is like skydiving in that regard.
At this point, it’s worth repeating two of my favorite cryonics stories (the intellectual world is composed of stories, as somebody said, in the same way the physical world is composed of atoms).
Story #1 involves the winner of the Omni magazine essay contest of Why I Want To Be Cryonically Suspended. The prize: a free sign-up to Alcor, no money needed. The young man who won with the best essay about why he wanted to do it, was duly offered the prize he’d eloquently convinced himself, and everyone else, that he wanted. And when it came down to doing it, he couldn’t make himself do it. Interesting.
Story #2 is about Frederik Pohl, atheist S.F. writer of a lot of good tales, including one of the better cryonics stories, The Age of the Pussyfoot. Thirty years ago Pohl was approached by a cryonics organization about signing up, on the basis of his novel and known beliefs. He gave the usual counter argument about the chance not being worth the expense. The return was an offer to cryopreserve him free, for the publicity. He was taken aback, and said he’d have to think about it. Later, after much prodding, he produced what he admitted (and hadn’t realized before) was the real reason: he couldn’t get past the creep factor. Pohl is still alive as of this writing (he’s 90), but he’ll eventually die and won’t be cryopreserved, even though his intellect tells him (and has long told him) that he should.
So, in summary, I’m happy that Eliezer spent some time in Florida socializing with happy yuppies who had already made it past the barrier to signing up for cryonics. But for those out in the world who haven’t actually done that yet--- signed and notarized--- there is one more test of mettle for the Hero, which even they may not realize yet awaits them. This is a test of the power of will over emotion, and it’s not for the faint of spirit. In some ways it’s like the scene from the Book of the Dead where the dead person’s heart is weighed, except that this is where the would-be cryonicist finds that his or her courage is being weighed. It’s like doing the long tax return while signing yourself up for organ donation or medical school dissection, or the like.
I wish them luck. I wonder if anybody asked people at the conference what their own experiences had been, in getting past the tests of the underworld, or the under-MIND, to gain that strange chance to be your own Osiris.
Steve Harris, M.D. Alcor member since 1987
I live in the UK, and when I was self-employed I had an accountant do my taxes. I'm looking into signing up, and it looks to be much, much harder than that; not an "oh, must get around to it" thing but a long and continuing period of investigation to even find out what I need to sort out. This bar currently seems very, very high to me; if it were as simple as getting a mortgage I'd probably already be signed up.
Rudi Hoffman has sent word back.
The quote I was given for whole-life (constant coverage, constant premiums, no time limit) is $1900 per year (I'm 40, male and healhty), for a payout of $200K.
The more problematic news is that the life insurance company may start requiring a US Social Security number.
I'm baffled that this is the stumbling block for so many people. I can understand being worried about the cost/uncertainty trade-off, but I really don't understand why it's any less troublesome than buying life insurance, planning a funeral, picking a cemetery plot, writing a will, or planning for cremation. People make choices that involve contemplating their death all the time, and people make choices about unpleasant-sounding medical treatments all the time.
Well, maybe more people would sign up if Alcor's process didn't involve as much thinking about the alternatives? I had thought that the process was just signing papers and arranging life insurance. But if Alcor's process is turning people away, maybe that needs to change.
Maybe I'm just deluding myself: I'm not in a financial position to sign up yet, and I plan on signing up when I am. But I can't see the "creep factor" being an issue for me at all. I have no idea what that would feel like.
This is the exact sentence that crossed my mind upon reading the original comment.
I often find that my reactions and feelings are completely different from other people's, though.
For what it's worth, I've heard people initially had many of the same hangups about life insurance, saying that they didn't want to gamble on death. The way that salespeople got around that was by emphasizing that the contracts would protect the family in event of the breadwinner's death, and thus making it less of a selfish thing.
I wonder if cryo needs a similar marketing parallel. "Don't you want to see your parents again?"
Steve I didn't know that story about Frederik Pohl-thank you for posting it, fascinating. Also, they weren't all yuppies at the FL teens & twenties cryonicist conference, there were representatives from all sorts of backgrounds/classes. Personally my motivation in signing up for cryonics is that I think the amount of knowledge that we have to learn about the Universe pales in comparison to my short natural lifespan, that keeps me in awe-as I currently learn all that I can, and all the new things I realize I don't know. That said, I'm perfectly happy with my own life, with my family, friends and community work and if I get more time, an "extreme lifespan" to see what is out there in the billions of light years of space, if I get more time to help end inequality if it still exists--or to move on to other goals, then so be it-I got lucky that cryonics worked ;-)