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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.
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Comments (930)
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 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. :-)
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.
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
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'.
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!
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)
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.
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.)
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).
"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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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
(In other words: "I love humanity. It's people I can't stand." - Linus van Pelt)?
I'm rather the opposite. My feelings can best be summed up by a Pirates of Penzance quote rather than a webcomic:
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.
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.
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.
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 ;-)
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.
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.
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 :-)
"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.
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.
Sorry if this is a tedious question. Just started the conversation with my family in a more serious way after looking up life insurance prices (think it's going OK so far), and there's something I wanted to ask so that I know the answer if they ask. Do you have shares in Alcor or CI, or any other interests to declare?
Thanks!
As far as I know, there's currently no one on Earth who gets paid when another cryonicist signs up, except Rudi Hoffman who sells the life insurance. I'll go ahead and state specifically that I have no shares in either of those nonprofits (nor does anyone, but they have paid employees) and I do not get paid a commission when anyone signs up (nor does anyone AFAIK except Rudi, and he's paid by the life insurance company).
BTW, thanks for the reference to Hoffman. Looking at Hoffman's page about life assurance for non-US people it looks like for me cryonics is much, much more expensive than your estimates - he quotes $1500-$3000 a year. Talking to my friends reveals no cheaper options in the UK and big legal problems. I definitely will not be able to afford this barring a big change in my circumstances :(
This extrobrittania video contains some financial details about cryonics in the uk.
Don't let the prices on that page discourage your from doing independent research.
There might be life insurance providers in your areas that would have no problem naming Alcor or CI as the beneficiary and that could sell your enough life insurance to cover all costs for a lot less money than that.
edit: I've just had a look, and I could get a 10-year term insurance for $200,000 for about $200/year. Definitely doesn't have to be many thousands.
I would really like someone to expand upon this:
The estimate on that page is just that, an estimate. I'm awaiting an actual quote before making up my mind on the matter. Suggest you fill out the quote request form and contact him; if you do, I'd be interested in what you learned. I'm still waiting for word back myself.
In France cryonics is actually illegal, which is more of a challenge. Bodies are to be buried or cremated within 6 days of death; I don't know if that's a reasonable window of opportunity for transport. What is the UK's position ?
The decision tree for cryonics is complex at least. I was briefly tempted earlier today to look into software for argument mapping to expose my reasoning more clearly, if only for myself. Even if I ultimately confirm my intuition that it's what I want to do, the mapping would show more clearly which steps are critical to tackle and in what order.
Oh, and an argument map for cryonics would be fantastic.
Existing cryonics argument maps: here.
(I'll update this comment if I find more.)
I'm up for creating a more complete one than can currently be found on the Web.
I'd appreciate some help in selecting some form of software support.
Actually the difficulty is going to be in finding the opposition.
I have scoured Google as best I can, asked my friends on my blog for help, and even emailed some prominent people who've spoken out against cryonics, looking for the best anti-cryonics articles I can find. It is really astonishing that the pickings are so slim. You'd think there would be at least one blogger with medical knowledge who occasionally posted articles that tried to rebut things that cryonicists actually say, for example; I haven't found it.
I'm not sure what a broad search for objections really buys you. From my perspective there is a "basic cryonics scenario" and a smallish number of variants. If you pick a scenario which is a good compromise between maximally plausible and maximally inconvenient, you should flush out most of the key points where things can go wrong.
The basic scenario might be something like this:
There are shorter alternative scenarios, such as the ones in which you pay for the insurance but never need it owing to life extension and other technology catching up faster than expected, so that you never actually execute your suspension contract. You'd turn up fewer reasons not to do it if you only examined those, so it makes sense to look at the scenario that exercises the greater number of options for things to go wrong. On the other hand, we shouldn't burden the scenario with extraneous details, such as major changes in the legal status of cryonics facilities, etc. These should be accounted for by a "background uncertainty" about what the relatively far future holds in store.
The backbone of our argument map is that outline above, perhaps with more "near" details filled in as we go back over that insanely long discussion thread.
The research articles are only likely to help us out with the major theoretical issue, which is "How much of your personality is erased through damage done by death, suspension and revival." Answers range from "all" to "none" and hinge partly on philosophical stances, such as whether you believe personality is equivalent to information encoded in the brain.
All that is definitely part of the decision tree, but seems only a small part of the story. They are things we won't be able to do much about. The interesting part of the tree is the things we could do something about. As you noted, if cryonics works in principle but is unaffordable or runs into tricky practical problems such as getting your body moved about, you're no longer weighing just a money cost against a philosophical possibility; you're weighing the much larger hassle cost of changing your life plans (e.g. moving to the US sooner or later, or setting yourself a goal of getting rich), and that changes the equation drastically.
The estimate is a range with a lower end. I may be able to afford it one day, in which case I don't want to piss him off by mucking him about before then.
There's some evidence other options may be closer to reach; I haven't entirely given up yet. At the very least I'll have cleared a lot of the hurdles that people "cryocrastinate" about, like investigating the options and talking to family, making a later signup more likely.
Let me rephrase. Rudi Hoffman says it costs a minimum of $1500 a year. The quotes I have seen for term life insurance work out to less than $300 a year for a $100K payout and a 30-year period. There is a discrepancy here which is puzzling, and one of the best ways I see to resolve the discrepancy is to ask the man himself, which I have done.
He is taking way more time to respond than I was expecting, which is messing up my feelings about the whole thing. You would help me if you were to contact him yourself and share your info. We don't know each other much, so I won't feel bad if you aren't interested in helping me out. Having said that: will you help me ?
You should be looking at whole life insurance, not term life insurance.
Let me know if he takes more than a week to reply...
Could you elaborate on why you think that?
If I get 40 year term insurance now but live to 78, I'll then be uninsured and unable to afford more insurance, so I won't be covered when I most need it.
The general idea of term insurance is to ensure that your heirs get something if you die during the n years it takes you to build them an inheritance. The cryonics equivalent of this idea is that you don't need whole life insurance if you expect over the term of the insurance to save enough money to pay for cryonics out of pocket.
I suspect you are under-estimating your future earnings ability, unless you plan on going into something that pays poorly, like trying to solve existential risk.
Magic, thanks! As it turns out, people's default assumption isn't that I've joined a cult, it's that this is my mid-life crisis. What I find very odd is that some of this is from people who knew me ten years ago!
Alcor and CI are both 501(c)(3) nonprofits. From the IRS guide to applying for tax-exempt status:
...
The only people making money off this are the employees (all 15 of them between CI and Alcor) and the life insurance companies. The rest of us have to settle for a warm fuzzy feeling when people sign up.
ETA: Correction. CI is not a 501(c)(3), just a regular nonprofit. Thanks ciphergoth.
Actually, the CI is not a 501(c)(3) though it is a non-profit.
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?
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).
I'm pretty sure that at the root, most furries are furries because of anthropomorphized animal cartoon shows. I think a well designed commercial could push a lot of people over the edge.
Thanks, now I have an entertaining conspiracy theory about Avatar.
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.)
AFAICT your statement is simply false.
I won't try to judge the original statement, but I do think that people believing cryonics to be a scam is a serious problem -- much more serious than I would have believed. I have talked to some friends (very bright friends with computer science backgrounds, in the process of getting college degrees) about the idea, and a shockingly large number of them seemed quite certain that Alcor was a scam. I managed to dissuade maybe one of those, but in the process I think I convinced at least one more that I was a sucker.
Reasoning by perceptual recognition. Cryonics seems weird and involves money, therefore it's perceptually recognized as a scam. The fact that it would be immensely labor-intensive to develop the suspension tech, isn't marketed well or at all really, and would have a very poor payoff on invested labor as scams go, will have little impact on this. The lightning-fast perceptual system hath spoken.
I'm surprised that you say your friends are computer programmers. Programmers need to be capable of abstract thought.
It has struck me that if you wanted to set out to create a profitable scam, cryonics looks like quite a good idea. I don't have any particular reason to think that actual cryonics companies are a scam but it does seem like something of a perfect crime. It's almost like a perfect Ponzi scheme.
Currently it is set up as a bit of a Ponzi scheme; without new people coming in (and donations) these companies wouldn't survive very long. But then, with a little tweaking you could apply that analysis to any business with customers to make it look like a Ponzi scheme.
Could you write this up in more detail somewhere? The claim is that the "patient care trust" doesn't need new customers to be financially viable, and should keep going even if the primary business fails. If this isn't true it would be worth drawing attention to.
This would require cryonics companies to lie about their finances. Otherwise they have no way to extract money from their reserves without alarming customers.
I think byrnema has a point. I don't think most people are even aware that cryonics isn't sci-fi anymore.
The way people say "it's science fiction" as if it tells you anything at all about the plausibility of what's under discussion drives me crazy. Doctor Who and communications satellites are both science fiction.
Anecdote: I read sci-fi as a kid, learned of the concept of cryonics, thought it was a good idea if it worked... and then it never occurred to me to research whether it was a real technology. Surely I would have heard of it if it was?
Then years later I ran into a mention on OvercomingBias and signed up pretty much immediately.
Source ? A non-sustainable cryonics organization is one you don't want to be signed up with. These dewars use electricity (EDIT: oops, no they don't; substitute "rental for the space to store them").
You still need to create the nitrogen in the first place.
But you can read the financial statements yourself: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/financial.html (Seriously, am I the only person here who can look things up? The answers are on, like, page 10.)
I should mention that I define 'running at a loss' as not being able to pay all bills out of either investment income or out of fees (membership dues, freezing fees, etc.); if there is a gap between expenses and the former, then they are running at a loss and depending on the charity of others to make it up.
And this is the case. In 2008, they spent $1.7 million - but they got 622k for freezing, and ~300k in fees & income, for a total of $990,999. In other words, Alcor is not currently self-sustaining.
(Why aren't they bankrupt? Because of $1,357,239 in 'contributions, gifts, and grants', and 'noncash contributions' of $753,979.)
Thanks, that's useful info.
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.
A clear signal that cryonics companies don't have an advertising budget?
The more I think about it the more likely it seems... So: finding out about them is the first barrier to entry.
To me cryonics causes a stark panic inducing terror that is only alittle less than death itself and I would never in a million years do it if I used my own judgment on the matter but I decided that Eliezer probably knows more than me on this subject and that I should trust his judgement above my own. So i am in the process of signing up now. Seems much less expensive than I imagined also.
This is at least one skill I have tried to cultivate until I grew more educated myself; the ability to export my judgement consciously to another person. Thinking for yourself is great to learn new things and practice thinking skills but since I am just starting out I am trying to build solid mindset so its kinda silly for me to think I can provide one to myself by myself without tons wasted effort when I could just use one of the good ones that are already available.
I would probably be more likely to try such a thing if I was younger but I am getting started abit late and need a leg up. Though I do guess the idea is abit risky but on an inituitve level it seems less risky than trusting my own judgement which is generally scared of everything. Yep.
I believe Eliezer has been assimilated.
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.)
Ha, Cryonics as an outcome lens for quantum immortality? I find that surprisingly intuitive.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
taw, real life insurance costs increase drastically as you age, but only if you are beginning the policy. They don't readjust the rates on a life insurance policy every year; that's just buying a series of one-year term-life policies.
I.e., if I buy whole-life insurance coverage at 25, my rate gets locked in. My monthly/annual premium does not increase as I age due to the risk of dying increasing.
How does the insurer hope to make a profit, given that they're probably betting on death being inevitable?
In the UK these are called life assurance policies. Assurance, because the event (death) will assuredly happen. You pay a fixed annual sum every year; the insurance company pays out a lump sum when you die. It is a combination of insurance and investment. Insurance, because the death payout happens even if you don't live long enough for your payments to cover the lump sum. Investment, because if you live long enough the final payment is funded by what you put in, plus the proceeds of the insurance company's investments, minus their charges -- part of which is the cost of early payouts to less fortunate people.
Some versions have a maturity date: if you're still alive then, you collect the lump sum yourself and the policy terminates. At that point the lump sum will be less that what you could have made by investing those payments yourself. The difference is what you are paying in order to protect against dying early.
As always, remember that investments may plummet as well as fall.
AngryParsley did a good job summing it up below.
1) While death is inevitable, payout is not.
2) Investment income.
3) Inflation eroding the true cost of the payout.
"Funded by life insurance" strikes me as an oversimplified summary of a strategy that must necessarily be more sophisticated. Plus "life insurance" actually means several different things, only some of which actually insure you against loss of life.
I'm still trying to find out more, but it seems the most effective plan would be a "term" life insurance (costs about $30 a month for 20 years at my age, 40ish and healthy), which lasts a limited duration, isn't an investment, but does pay out a large sum to designated beneficiaries in the event of death. (I haven't done the math on inflation yet.) You would combine that with actual long-term investments earmarked for funding the actual costs of the procedure if you need it after 20 years. These investments may be "life insurance" of the usual kind, or stocks, or whatever.
Doing that mitigates the scenario I'm really worried about: learning in 2 to 10 years that in spite of being (relatively) young, healthy and wealthy I have a fatal disease (cancer, Lou Gehrig, whatever) and having to choose between my family's stability and dying for ever. Cryonics as insurance against feeling dreadfully stupid.
In twenty years I expect I will have obtained more information, and gotten richer, and might make different choices.
I'm interested enough in cryo that I'm actually trying to get actual quotes, as opposed to merely speculating; I have gotten in touch with Rudi Hoffman who was recommended earlier on LW. My situation - non-US resident - might mean that whatever results I get are not really representative, but I'm willing to report back here with whatever info I get.
"Lie" is much too strong a term, but I get the same result when I multiply 180 by 50, and I'm curious to understand the discrepancy.
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'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 find it rather odd that no one has answered the original question.
I'm signed up, and I'll be your friend.
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.
What's the difference between making friends now and making friends after you wake up? What's the difference between making a family now, and making a new family then? (here I'm referencing both this comment about finding new friends, and your comment in the other thread about starting a new family)
If a friendly singularity happens, I think it's likely that the desire of extroverts like you for companionship and close relationship will have been taken into account along the way and that forming these bonds will still be possible.
Of course right now I'd want to be with my current fiancé, and I'm planning to try to convince her to sign up for cryonics, but if I lost her, I'd still rather live and have to figure out another way to get companionship in the far future than to die.
First of all, my friends aren't interchangeable. It's already a big step for me to be willing to make a presorted cryonics-friendly friend as a substitute for getting my entire existing cohort of companions on board, or even just one. Second of all, waiting until after revival introduces another chain of "ifs" - particularly dreadful ifs - into what's already a long, tenuous chain of ifs.
Of course they aren't. I'm just saying that I'd prefer making new friends to death, and that despite the fact that I love my friends very much, there's nothing that says that they are the "best friends I can ever make" and that anybody else can only provide an inferior relationship.
Once again, between the certitude of death and the possibility of life in a post-friendly-singularity world, I'll take the "ifs" even if it means doing hard things like re-building a social circle (not something easy for me).
I'm just having a really hard time imagining myself making the decision to die because I lost someone (or even everyone). In fact, I just lost my uncle (brain cancer), and I loved him dearly, he was like a second father to me. His death just made me feel even more strongly that I want to live.
But I suppose we could be at opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to these kinds of things.
I have a cryonics related question, and this seems as good a thread as any to ask it.
I'm a New Zealander and most discussions of cryonics that I've been exposed to focus on the United States, or failing that Europe. If I have to have my head packed in ice and shipped to the US for preservation its going to degrade a fair bit before it gets there (best case scenario its a 12 hour flight, and that's just to LA, in practice time from death to preservation could be days). This is not a pleasant prospect for me, since it could lower the probability of successful revival by a large margin.
Since there are about 24 million people in Australia and New Zealand I'm sure I'm not the first person to realise this. Is anyone out there aware of any reputable cryonics organisations that are a bit closer to home? Alternatively, can anyone point me to sources that contradict my belief that the distance my head would have to travel would make cryonics a poor bet?
I am also a New Zealander, AND I am signed up with Cryonics Institute. You might be interested in contacting the Cryonics Association of Australasia but I'm sure there is no actual suspension and storage nearby.
Besides you are missing the main point, if you don't sign up now and you die tomorrow, you are annihilated - no questions asked. I would be wary of this question as it can be an excuse to not sign up.
There has been talk of a cryosuspension facility in Australia. But flying the body to North America is the only way it's been done so far.
I was raised to consider organ donation to be the moral thing to do on my death.
I am less skeptical than average of cryonics, and nervous about "neuro" options since I'd prefer to be revived earlier and with a body. On the other hand, it still seems to me that organ donation is the more effective option for more-people-being-alive-and-happy, even if it's not me.
Am I stuck with the "neuro" option for myself? How should that translate to my children?
What do most people on LW think about organ donation?
ETA: the Cryonics Institute (the only page I've seen linked here) doesn't have that option, so am I stuck paying much more? Informative links would be appreciated.
The "best" organ donors are young people who suffered a massive head trauma, typically in a motor vehicle accident... If you die in a situation where cryopreservation can proceed, you will probably be too old or too diseased for your organs to be of use. So perhaps the two options are not exclusive after all.
To make up for not being an organ donor cut back on some area of personal consumption and donate the money to a charity. Since the probability of someone actually getting your organs if you agreed to be an organ donor are, I think, very low you wouldn't have to give that much to a charity for you do be doing more social good through the charitable contribution than you would have as a potential organ donor.
So does the lack of discussion of organ donation stem from its perceived lack of efficacy? If so why discuss cryonics so heavily, when it costs money? I remember Robin Hanson assigning it around a 5% chance of success (for his personal setup, not cryonics eventually working at all which I assume would be much higher), and I would naively assume that I have a greater than 5% chance of my organs helping someone (any statistics on this?).
I agree that donating to charity is likely to be more effective, but it is also likely to be more effective than cryonics (as discussed elsewhere) and donating organs doesn't actually take away from my charity funds.
I don't mean to speak to making agreements for children, I think that stands as the right thing to do.
You don't have a fixed amount of charity funds, you have the amount you choose to give.
Fly to a really poor country. Seek out a very poor family that has lots of kids. Give this family $1,000, which could easily be five years income for this family. On average you will have done much more good than if you spent this $1,000 on yourself and signed up to be an organ donor. Make sure this $1,000 does not reduce your other charitable giving.
If you had cancer would you forgo treatment because the out-of-pocket amount you would have to pay for the treatment would have been better spent helping others?
This is not a rational answer to the question of whether it is more ethical to sign up for cryonics or donate organs, it is a rationalization. If magfrump decides it is more ethical to sign up for cryonics than donate his organs, he must decide this based on the ethics of those two choices. Someone might rationalize that it's OK to be less ethical 'over here' if they're more ethical 'over there', but it still doesn't change the ethics of those two choices.
The exception is if the ethics 'over here' and the ethics 'over there' are inter-dependent. So donating money to a family in a poor country would be ethically relevant if one choice facilitates donating to the family and one does not. Here, we have the exact opposite of what was suggested: magrump can use the money he saves from not signing up for cryonics to help the family, and so he can consider this an argument in favor of the ethicality of not signing up for cryonics.
(But, magfrump, I would add that we also have an ethical obligation to value our own lives. The symmetry in ethics-space can usually be found. Here, I can identify it in the hypothetical space where cryonics works: the person who needs an organ can also be cryonically suspended, perhaps until an organ is available. Then you both could live. In the space where cryonics doesn't work, organ donation is more ethical, since at least one of you can live.)
Well, I do know that cryopreservation and organ donation are currently mutually exclusive, even if you go with a "neuro" option.
I don't know whether it's better to sign up for cryonics or to be an organ donor.
For the record, does anyone have a good website I can link my father to containing a reasonably persuasive case for signing up for cryonics? He's a smart guy and skilled at Traditional Rationality; I think he can be persuaded to sign up, but I don't know if I can persuade him. (When I told him the actual price of cryonics, his response was something like "Sure, you can preserve someone for that amount, but revival, once it exists, would probably cost the equivalent of millions of dollars, and who would pay for that?")
The technology to revive suspendees will likely cost billions to develop, but who cares about development costs? What matters is the cost per procedure, and we already have "magical" technologies which carry only a reasonable cost per use, for instance MRI scanning.
The Future of Humanity Institute has a technological roadmap for Whole Brain Emulation which tantalizingly mentions MRI as a technology which already has close to the required resolution to scan brains at a resolution suitable for emulation.
Freezing is itself a primitive technology, it's only the small scale at which it is currently implemented which keeps the costs high. You don't need to look very far to see how cheap advanced-to-the-point-of-magical technology can get, given economies of scale; it's sitting on your desk, or in your pocket.
If it is feasible at all, and if it is ever done at scale, it will be cheap. This last could be a very big if: current levels of adoption are not encouraging. However, you can expect that as soon as the technical feasibility is proven many more people are going to develop an interest in cryonics.
Even assuming no singularity and no nanotech, a relatively modest extrapolation from current technology would be enough get us to "uploads" from frozen brains. Of course, reaching the tech level is only half the story - you'd still have to prove that in practice the emulated brains are "the same people". Our understanding of how the brain implements consciousness might be flawed, perhaps Penrose turns out to be right after all, etc.
Yeah, Penrose's position that the human brain is a hypercomputer isn't really supported by known physics, but there's still enough unknown and poorly understood physics that it can't be ruled out. His "proof" that human brains are hypercomputers based on applying Godel's incompleteness theorem to human mathematical reasoning, however, missed the obvious loophole: Godel's theorem only applies to consistent systems, and human reasoning is anything but consistent!
I thought the obvious loophole was that brains aren't formal systems.
If you can simulate them in a Turing machine, then they might as well be.
Try You Only Live Twice ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/wq/you_only_live_twice/ ) perhaps?
Revival when first developed will probably cost the equivalent of hundreds of millions. You won't be revived until the cost is much lower; if progress continues and UFAI is avoided, I can't see how that can fail to happen.
Well, crap. That's something I hadn't even thought of yet.
I'm currently struggling with actually signing up for cryonics myself so this angle hadn't even crossed my mind.
I'll face very strong opposition from my wife, family, and friends when I finally do sign up. I can't imagine what kind of opposition I'll face when I attempt to sign my 3-month old daughter up.
I've been planning a top-level post about the rational thing to do when you're in my position. What position you ask? You'll find out in my post. Suffice it to say for now that I don't think I'm a typical member of the LW community.
I, for one, look forward to reading your post.
If Eliezer's post has motivated you, I encourage you to write it soon before that motivation fades.
I'm still working on this post, but writing it has become more difficult than I anticipated.
Much of what I want to say is things that I would like to remain private for now.
When I say "private", I mean I don't mind them being connected with my LW user account, but I'd rather they weren't connected with my real life and since they're unique sort of things, and my real name is also my LW user name, I'm having difficulty with anonymizing the content of the post.
Point taken. Writing commenced.
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.
IAWYC, but to nitpick, not all Christians believe in an eternity of torture for nonbelievers. Though of course the conclusion follows for any belief in a substantially better afterlife for believers.
(I feel like this is important to point out, to avoid demonizing an outgroup, but don't trust that feeling very much. What do others think?)
Indeed, but I wonder how they deal with passages like Revelation 14:11, Matthew 25:41, or Mark 9:43.
Its conceptually possible to believe that the Bible is full of nonsense yet Jesus really did die for our sins. But nobody ever seems to actually hold this position. Or if they do, they never seem to come out and say it.
If you really want to know, you could try asking them. Or reading their books, if you don't know any. You could even think up good arguments yourself for reconciling the belief with the verses.
I have no book recommendations. My point is that flaunting Biblical quotations and going "nyah! nyah!" does not make a good argument, even if the conclusion is correct. Zombie-hunting requires better instruments than that.
I have. You point out the verses to them and they say things like "Well all I know is that God is just." Or they just say "Hmm." What I want to know is what a thinking sort of hell-denying Christian says.
Since this is essentially a heretical position, I'm not sure how heavily it's defended in the literature. Still, I do have in my bookshelf an anthology containing a universalist essay by Marilyn McCord Adams, where she states that "I do not regard Scripture as infallible [... but ...] I do not regard my universalist theology as un-Scriptural, because I believe the theme of definitive divine triumph is central to the Bible". She seems to want to reject the Bible and accept it too.
I think the most coherent Christian position would be: There is a God. Various interesting things happened at God's doing, including Jesus and his miracles. The people who witnessed all these events wrote about them, but invariably these accounts are half fiction or worse. Paul is clearly a charlatan.
But nobody seems to believe this: Christians who think the Bible is fallible nevertheless act as if it is mostly right.
It's necessary when dealing with the doublethink of people who want to take the Bible as divine yet reject key parts of it.
Note that this sort of comment provokes an automatic reaction to fight back, rather than to consider whether you might be correct.
Many doctrines are collected here. Not all have the damned eternally waterboarded with boiling lead. For example, the Orthodox churches teach that hell is the response to the direct presence of God by the soul which has rejected Him. It is no more a punishment than the pain you feel if you cut a finger.
And then, whatever hell is, who goes there, and do they stay there for eternity? Doctrines differ on this as well -- the issue of works vs. faith, or the issue of those who have never encountered the Word and have not been in a position to accept or reject it.
How do they explain Biblical passages? By interpreting them (as they would say) correctly. Unless you look to extreme fringe groups who think that the King James Bible was a new revelation whose every letter is to be as meticulously preserved and revered as Moslems do the Koran, every Christian doctrine allows that the text needs interpretation. As well, the Catholic and Orthodox churches do not regard the Bible as the sole source of the Word, regarding the settled doctrine of the church as another source of divine revelation. There is also the Book of Nature, which God also wrote.
With multiple sources of divine revelation, but an axiomatic unity of that revelation, any conflicts must result from imperfect human understanding. Given the axiom, it is really not difficult to come up with resolutions of apparent conflicts. Confabulating stories in order to maintain an immovable idea is something the brain is very good at. Watch me confabulate a Bayesian justification of confabulation! Strong evidence can always defeat strong priors, and vice versa. So if the unity of God's Word is as unshakeable as 2+2=4, a mere difficult passage is less than a feather on the scales.
I say this not to teach Christian doctrines (I'm as atheist as anyone, and my Church of Scotland upbringing was as unzealous as it could possibly be and still be called a religion), but to point out that Christians do actually have answers to these questions. Ok, bad answers if you like, but if you want to argue against them you need to either tackle those answers, or find a weapon so awesome it blows the entire religious enterprise out of the water. (I'm sure there's a perfect LW link for the latter, but I can't at the moment recall where. This is rather diffuse.) Just quoting the Bible is like creationists smugly telling each other that evolutionists think a monkey gave birth to a man. It's an exercise in pouring scorn on Them. You know, those Others, over There.
As Nick Tarleton warned, upthread.
It's not like that at all. Many Bible passages dealing with Hell are perfectly clear, whereas it takes a great distortion of evolutionary theory to get to "a monkey gave birth to a man".
Speaking of thinking Christians makes me think of Fred Clark: some clue might be found in his interpretation of Genesis 6-9.
It would be easier to accept texts as mere teaching stories if they were clearly intended as such. A few are, like the Book of Job, and possibly, Jonah. Parts of Genesis, maybe (though I doubt it). But it can't be right to dismiss as a mere story everything that doesn't seem likely or decent. Much of it is surely intended literally.
Frequently, by not knowing about them.
They do, but they express it as either "the Bible was written by fallible men" or "it's all Deep Metaphor".
A very common argument taught by the traditional churches (as opposed to the neo-evangelical churches in America) that the notions of "eternal fire" and "hell" are just symbols to express the pain caused by the distance from God. Therefore, the punishment is self-inflicted, not something imposed by God directly, but rather a logical consequence.
It's not too hard to interpret these passages to mean that hell exists, and is only for certain kinds of sins. There's a difference between rejecting God and never having heard of him, for instance.
I'm always astounded when Protestants do actually believe the Bible is not full of nonsense. The Catholic Church did a lot of editing / selection of what went in there, using "Sacred Tradition" as their primary justification. Given that Protestants reject Sacred Tradition, it should follow that they have no basis for choosing which apocrypha should have been included in the first place, and shouldn't just take the Catholics' word for it.
Protestant religions are mostly political constructs. They tried to make a few theological changes, but mostly on the cosmetic level only to justify the political independence from the Pope.
Even if it would not be the case, religions need something sacrosanct, which is the scripture in this case. It would have been politically very unwise to try to compromise the apparent sanctity of that source, especially since it was very easy to put their own interpretation to it. Even modern evangelical religions don't try to modify the wording of the actual script.
Additionally, since the language of religion has been latin for more than 1500 years, the actual text of the bible changed practically nothing since around 400. One could argue that the church and its ideology that time was more different from the current catholic ones than the current protestant churches and their teachings.
Also, there are some Christian denominations which think that nonbelievers simply die and don't get revived after the world has ended, unlike the believers who are.
IIRC some also put more weight on doing good works during your life than whether you are actually a believer or not.
It's good reasoning (from respective premises) in both cases. It is believing that the One Religion is True that is stupid. We have further negative associations with that kind of statement because we expect most 'stable' religious people to compartmentalise their beliefs such that the stupidity doesn't leak out into their actual judgements.
Could you elaborate on this?
If you are depressed, or not enjoying life, or not satisfied with who you are for some reason or other, have you considered that if we get to a future where technology is vastly more advanced than it is now, that there might be ways to fix that and at least bring you to the level of "life enjoyment" that others who want to sign up for cryonics have (if not much more than that since we are currently very limited)?
Because of that possibility, maybe it would make sense to sign up, and if you get to the "other side" and realize that you still don't value your existence and there's no way to change that, then commit suicide.
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.
Just so I understand this part of your point, what do you mean by "hero" (as in "I am a hero" but also the previous paragraph where you talk about who is and isn't a hero)? Is that a reference to some earlier article I missed, maybe?
You're not missing any context. I thought there was a pretty clear divide at the gathering between people living their ordinary lives as sound studio technicians or scientists or whatever; and people trying to change life as we know it, like me or the cancer-cure guy or the old guard who'd spent years trying to do something about the insane loss of life. I'm not sure how I could make it any clearer. Some were in class "heroes", some were in class "the ordinary lives that heroes protect".
Presumably some would reserve the word "hero" for those who actually succeed in changing life as we know it (for the better), and thus would be confused by your usage.
I chose to interpret it as hero in the literary sense. There is something epic about Eliezer's life mission, no?
Let's just hope he isn't a tragic hero. You don't need to succeed at your mission to be a hero; you just need to be the protagonist in the story. It's all very absurd, but surely more so for Eliezer than you and me...
Yeah, maybe a better term to use in this context would be something like "revolutionary" (a bit aggrandizing, but so is "hero", and I'd say it's well-deserved). That would be for those who are actively trying, whether or not they have personally made any significant, lasting contributions — the heroes would be those who have.
(Not that we'd want this to turn into a status game, of course. The only point of debate here is whether clearer terminology could be used.)
"Aspiring hero" is good enough, I think.
I could accept that. That's really the only point I was trying to make; that trying to do something noble, like curing cancer, is praiseworthy, but does not automatically make someone a hero. Lots of people try to cure cancer; most of them are well-intentioned kooks or quacks... and even of those who aren't, those who work on possible cancer cures within a rigourous scientific/rational framework, most of them will fail. As I said, they are worthy of praise and recognition for their efforts, but they are not automatically heroes. But I would be fine with calling them "aspiring heroes".
I'm trying to make sure I'm not arguing about definitions here, but I'm not sure if the disagreement is over the definition of the word "hero" or over what we value enough to consider heroic. I might be persuaded that even trying to cure cancer is a heroic act, but I'm not sure how we could avoid having that include the well-intentioned kooks too.
Edit: Actually, I think I just persuaded myself: the well-intentioned kooks tend to promote their kookery without sufficient evidence, possibly giving people false hope or even leading people to choose an ineffective treatment over one relatively likely to be effective. That is not heroic regardless of intent. I can accept that if a person is working on cancer treatments with rationality, scientific rigour, and intellectual honesty, then they can reasonably be described as heroic.
OP upvoted for displaying emotions that fit the facts.
Was this the get-together in Florida from the 8th to the 10th? I decided not to go since I assumed everyone would be from the atheist/libertarian/male/nerd/singularity/etc group. I'm glad to see I was wrong.