Steve_Rayhawk comments on That Magical Click - Less Wrong

58 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 January 2010 04:35PM

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Comment author: erniebornheimer 20 January 2010 09:44:36PM 12 points [-]

At the risk of revealing my stupidity...

In my experience, people who don't compartmentalize tend to be cranks.

Because the world appears to contradict itself, most people act as if it does. Evolution has created many, many algorithms and hacks to help us navigate the physical and social worlds, to survive, and to reproduce. Even if we know the world doesn't really contradict itself, most of us don't have good enough meta-judgement about how to resolve the apparent inconsistencies (and don't care).

Most people who try to make all their beliefs fit with all their other beliefs, end up forcing some of the puzzle pieces into wrong-shaped holes. Their favorite part of their mental map of the world is locally consistent, but the farther-out parts are now WAY off, thus the crank-ism.

And that's just the physical world. When we get to human values, some of them REALLY ARE in conflict with others, so not only is it impossible to try to force them all to agree, but we shouldn't try (too hard). Value systems are not axiomatic. Violence to important parts of our value system can have repercussions even worse than violence to parts of our world view.

FWIW, I'm not interested in cryonics. I think it's not possible, but even if it were, I think I would not bother. Introspecting now, I'm not sure I can explain why. But it seems that natural death seems like a good point to say "enough is enough." In other words, letting what's been given be enough. And I am guessing that something similar will keep most of us uninterested in cryonics forever.

Now that I think of it, I see interest in cryonics as a kind of crankish pastime. It takes the mostly correct idea "life is good, death is bad" to such an extreme that it does violence to other valuable parts of our humanity (sorry, but I can't be more specific).

To try to head off some objections:

  • I would certainly never dream of curtailing anyone else's freedom to be cryo-preserved, and I recognize I might change my mind (I just don't think it's likely, nor worth much thought).
  • Yes, I recognize how wonderful medical science is, but I see a qualitative difference between living longer and living forever.
  • No, I don't think I will change my mind about this as my own death approaches (but I'll probably find out). Nor do I think I would change my mind if/when the death of a loved one becomes a reality.

I offer this comment, not in an attempt to change anyone's mind, but to go a little way to answer the question "Why are some people not interested in cryonics?"

Thanks!

Comment author: Steve_Rayhawk 22 January 2010 03:14:51AM 3 points [-]

In my experience, people who don't compartmentalize tend to be cranks.

[. . .]

Most people who try to make all their beliefs fit with all their other beliefs, end up forcing some of the puzzle pieces into wrong-shaped holes. Their favorite part of their mental map of the world is locally consistent, but the farther-out parts are now WAY off, thus the crank-ism.

And that's just the physical world. When we get to human values, some of them REALLY ARE in conflict with others[. . .]

The post "Reason as memetic immune disorder" was related. I'll quote teasers so that you'll read it:

People who grow up with a religion learn how to cope with its more inconvenient parts by partitioning them off, rationalizing them away, or forgetting about them. Religious communities actually protect their members from religion in one sense - they develop an unspoken consensus on which parts of their religion members can legitimately ignore. New converts sometimes try to actually do what their religion tells them to do.

[. . .]

The reason I bring this up is that intelligent people sometimes do things more stupid than stupid people are capable of. There are a variety of reasons for this; but one has to do with the fact that all cultures have dangerous memes circulating in them, and cultural antibodies to those memes. The trouble is that these antibodies are not logical[. . . .] They are the blind spots that let us live with a dangerous meme without being impelled to action by it.

And my comment there:

If the culture is constrained to hold constant the religion or cultural norms, then the resulting selection will cause the culture to develop blind spots, and also develop an unspoken (because unspeakable) but viciously enforced meta-norm of not seeing the blind spots. But if the culture is constrained to hold opposite meta-norms constant, such as a norm of seeing the blind spots or a norm of actually doing what one's religion or cultural norms tell one do do, then the resulting selection will act against the dangerous memes instead.