= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
bshock comments on That Magical Click - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (400)
Once upon a time, I had a job where most of what I did involved signing up people for cryonics. I'm guessing that few other people on this site can say they've ever made a salary off that (unless you're reading this, Derek), and so I can speak with some small authority. Over those four excruciating years at Alcor, I spent hundreds of hours discussing the subject with hundreds of people.
Obviously I never came up with a definitive answer as to why some people get it and most don't. But I developed a working map of the conceptual space. Rather than a single "click," I found that there were a series of memetic filters.
The first and largest by far tended to be religious, which is to say, afterlife mythology. If you thought you were going to Heaven, Kolob, another plane of existence, or another body, you wouldn't bother investing the money or emotional effort in cryonics.
Only then came the intellectual barriers, but the boundary could be extremely vague. I think that the vast majority of people didnt have any trouble grasping the basic scientific arguments for cryonics; the actual logic filter always seemed relatively thin to me. Instead, people used their intellect to rationalize against cryonics, either motivated by existing beliefs (from one end) or by resulting anxieties (from the other).
Anxieties relating to cryonics tended to revolve around social situation and/or death. Some people identified so deeply with their current social situation, the idea of losing that situation (family, friends, standing, culture, etc.) was unthinkable. Others were afflicted by a sort of hypothetical survivor guilt; why did they deserve to live, when so many of their loved ones had died? Perhaps the majority were simply repulsed by any thought of death itself; most of them spent their lives trying not to think about the fact that we would die, and found it extremely depressing or disorienting when forced to confront that fact.
I don't think I could categorize the stages of approach to cryonics quite as neatly (and questionably) as the Kubler-Ross stages of dying. Clearly there was nothing inevitable about coming to accept cryonics, and approximately 90-95% of everyone I met never made it past the first filter. Even when people passed all of the memetic filters I've mentioned, they still had a tendency to become mired at the beginning or middle of their cryonics arrangements, floating in some sort of metastable emotional fog (starting cryonics arrangements felt like retreating from death, proceeding with them felt like approaching it).
Oh well, I haven't thought about this subject much since 1999. This is just my off-the-cuff memory of how I used to make a living.
Thank you for writing this.
If you ever feel like writing a longer post about your experience in the cryonics world, I'd love to read it and I suspect others would too.
If I might ask: why did you quit?
Betcha he got frustrated with how irrational people were. No joke.
I wish I had more of the knowledge that you have so that I could use it to update my models of people -- at the moment, I can't locate a place in my model to accommodate people being so reluctant to sign up for cryonics while believing that it could work.
(a) Could you give some information regarding the setting? Were these people that approached you, or did you approach them? Did you meet in a formal place, like an office in Alcor, or an informal setting, like on their way from one place to another?
(b)
How long would your conversations with these religious people be, on average? It seems they would have already made up their minds. How did their fear of screwing up their afterlife square with the typical belief that people can be resuscitated after 'flat-lining' in a hospital with souls intact?
(c)
What would you think of the hypothesis that people don't much value life outside their social connections? (A counter-argument is that people have taken boats and sailed to strange and foreign continents throughout history, but maybe they represent a small fraction of personalities.) Were people much more likely to sign up in groups of 3 or more?
(d)
This I find least intuitive, because cryonics would be a way to be in denial about death. They could imagine that the probability of successful awakening is as high as they want it to be. Do you think that they could have been repulsed or disoriented by something else like -- just speculating -- a primal fear of being a zombie / being punished for being greedy / the emotional consequences of having unfounded hope in immortality?
If you have an interest in answering any subset of these questions, thanks in advance.
If 90-95% made it past filter one, what are your estimates for the other filters?
What's the connotation of that? That they're deplorably irrational, or that ardent Cryonicists are weirdly asocial?
Waking up in a future society, where you don't know anyone, yours skills are useless, etc, is equivalent to exile, which is generally considered a punishment.
Exile is only a punishment because it is worse than staying at home. When the alternative is being dead, most people will take exile, as demonstrated by refugees from war zones.
Who stay with their families and compatriots.
If they can. And with enough signed up, the same may be true of those taking the long sleep.
But there is nothing they can do to exert any control over that.