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neuromancer92 comments on That Magical Click - Less Wrong
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Was there some particular bright line at which cryonics flipped from "impossible given current technology" to "failure to have universal cryonics is a sign of an insane society"? That is a sign change, not just a change in magnitude.
If we go back 50 or 100 years, we should be at a point where then-present preservation techniques were clearly inadequate. Maybe vitrification was the bright line, I do not pretend that preserving brains is a specialty of mine. I just empathize with those who still doubt that the technology is good enough to fulfill its claims prior to seeing a brain revived. We have a bold history of technological claims that turned out to be not all that, but we promise that it will work fine in twenty years.
That seems like a perfectly sane outside view: every (?) previous human preservation technique was found inadequate over a span of a few years or decades, so we assume against the latest one until proven otherwise.
We must still have large areas of the planet where it is still sane not to sign up your kids, notably where the per capita income is below $300/year.
Rather than being a sane view, this is a logical fallacy. I don't know of a specific name to give it, but survivorship bias and the anthropic principle are both relevant.
The fallacy is this: for anything a person tries to do, every relevant technology will be inadequate up to the one that succeeds. Inherently, the first success at something will end the need to make new steps towards it, so we will never see a new advance where past advances have been sufficient for an end.
The weak anthropic principle says that we only observe our universe when it is such that it will permit observers. Similarly, we can assume that if new developments are being made towards an aim, they are being made because past steps were inadequate. We cannot view new advances as having their chances of success biased by past failures since they come into existence only in the case that past attempts have indeed failed.
(I am aware that technologies are improved on even after they achieve their aim, but in these cases new objectives like "faster" or "cheaper" are still unsatisfied, and drive the progress.)
It's rather like the way that you only ever find something in the last place you look.