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That Magical Click
Followup to: Normal Cryonics
Yesterday I spoke of that cryonics gathering I recently attended, where travel by young cryonicists was fully subsidized, leading to extremely different demographics from conventions of self-funded activists. 34% female, half of those in couples, many couples with kids - THAT HAD BEEN SIGNED UP FOR CRYONICS FROM BIRTH LIKE A GODDAMNED SANE CIVILIZATION WOULD REQUIRE - 25% computer industry, 25% scientists, 15% entertainment industry at a rough estimate, and in most ways seeming (for smart people) pretty damned normal.
Except for one thing.
During one conversation, I said something about there being no magic in our universe.
And an ordinary-seeming woman responded, "But there are still lots of things science doesn't understand, right?"
Sigh. We all know how this conversation is going to go, right?
So I wearily replied with my usual, "If I'm ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself; a blank map does not correspond to a blank territory -"
"Oh," she interrupted excitedly, "so the concept of 'magic' isn't even consistent, then!"
Click.
She got it, just like that.
This was someone else's description of how she got involved in cryonics, as best I can remember it, and it was pretty much typical for the younger generation:
"When I was a very young girl, I was watching TV, and I saw something about cryonics, and it made sense to me - I didn't want to die - so I asked my mother about it. She was very dismissive, but tried to explain what I'd seen; and we talked about some of the other things that can happen to you after you die, like burial or cremation, and it seemed to me like cryonics was better than that. So my mother laughed and said that if I still felt that way when I was older, she wouldn't object. Later, when I was older and signing up for cryonics, she objected."
Click.
It's... kinda frustrating, actually.
There are manifold bad objections to cryonics that can be raised and countered, but the core logic really is simple enough that there's nothing implausible about getting it when you're eight years old (eleven years old, in my case).
Freezing damage? I could go on about modern cryoprotectants and how you can see under a microscope that the tissue is in great shape, and there are experiments underway to see if they can get spontaneous brain activity after vitrifying and devitrifying, and with molecular nanotechnology you could go through the whole vitrified brain atom by atom and do the same sort of information-theoretical tricks that people do to recover hard drive information after "erasure" by any means less extreme than a blowtorch...
But even an eight-year-old can visualize that freezing a sandwich doesn't destroy the sandwich, while cremation does. It so happens that this naive answer remains true after learning the exact details and defeating objections (a few of which are even worth considering), but that doesn't make it any less obvious to an eight-year-old. (I actually did understand the concept of molecular nanotech at eleven, but I could be a special case.)
Similarly: yes, really, life is better than death - just because transhumanists have huge arguments with bioconservatives over this issue, doesn't mean the eight-year-old isn't making the right judgment for the right reasons.
Or: even an eight-year-old who's read a couple of science-fiction stories and who's ever cracked a history book can guess - not for the full reasons in full detail, but still for good reasons - that if you wake up in the Future, it's probably going to be a nicer place to live than the Present.
In short - though it is the sort of thing you ought to review as a teenager and again as an adult - from a rationalist standpoint, there is nothing alarming about clicking on cryonics at age eight... any more than I should worry about my first schism with Orthodox Judaism coming at age five, when they told me that I didn't have to understand the prayers in order for them to work so long as I said them in Hebrew. It really is obvious enough to see as a child, the right thought for the right reasons, no matter how much adult debate surrounds it.
And the frustrating thing was that - judging by this group - most cryonicists are people to whom it was just obvious. (And who then actually followed through and signed up, which is probably a factor-of-ten or worse filter for Conscientiousness.) It would have been convenient if I'd discovered some particular key insight that convinced people. If people had said, "Oh, well, I used to think that cryonics couldn't be plausible if no one else was doing it, but then I read about Asch's conformity experiment and pluralistic ignorance." Then I could just emphasize that argument, and people would sign up.
But the average experience I heard was more like, "Oh, I saw a movie that involved cryonics, and I went on Google to see if there was anything like that in real life, and found Alcor."
In one sense this shouldn't surprise a Bayesian, because the base rate of people who hear a brief mention of cryonics on the radio and have an opportunity to click, will be vastly higher than the base rate of people who are exposed to detailed arguments about cryonics...
Yet the upshot is that - judging from the generation of young cryonicists at that event I attended - cryonics is sustained primarily by the ability of a tiny, tiny fraction of the population to "get it" just from hearing a casual mention on the radio. Whatever part of one-in-a-hundred-thousand isn't accounted for by the Conscientiousness filter.
If I suffered from the sin of underconfidence, I would feel a dull sense of obligation to doubt myself after reaching this conclusion, just like I would feel a dull sense of obligation to doubt that I could be more rational about theology than my parents and teachers at the age of five. As it is, I have no problem with shrugging and saying "People are crazy, the world is mad."
But it really, really raises the question of what the hell is in that click.
There's this magical click that some people get and some people don't, and I don't understand what's in the click. There's the consequentialist/utilitarian click, and the intelligence explosion click, and the life-is-good/death-is-bad click, and the cryonics click. I myself failed to click on one notable occasion, but the topic was probably just as clickable.
(In fact, it took that particular embarrassing failure in my own history - failing to click on metaethics, and seeing in retrospect that the answer was clickable - before I was willing to trust non-click Singularitarians.)
A rationalist faced with an apparently obvious answer, must assign some probability that a non-obvious objection will appear and defeat it. I do know how to explain the above conclusions at great length, and defeat objections, and I would not be nearly as confident (I hope!) if I had just clicked five seconds ago. But sometimes the final answer is the same as the initial guess; if you know the full mathematical story of Peano Arithmetic, 2 + 2 still equals 4 and not 5 or 17 or the color green. And some people very quickly arrive at that same final answer as their best initial guess; they can swiftly guess which answer will end up being the final answer, for what seem even in retrospect like good reasons. Like becoming an atheist at eleven, then listening to a theist's best arguments later in life, and concluding that your initial guess was right for the right reasons.
We can define a "click" as following a very short chain of reasoning, which in the vast majority of other minds is derailed by some detour and proves strongly resistant to re-railing.
What makes it happen? What goes into that click?
It's a question of life-or-death importance, and I don't know the answer.
That generation of cryonicists seemed so normal apart from that...
What's in that click?
The point of the opening anecdote about the Mind Projection Fallacy (blank map != blank territory) is to show (anecdotal) evidence that there's something like a general click-factor, that someone who clicked on cryonics was able to click on mysteriousness=projectivism as well. Of course I didn't expect that I could just stand up amid the conference and describe the intelligence explosion and Friendly AI in a couple of sentences and have everyone get it. That high of a general click factor is extremely rare in my experience, and the people who have it are not otherwise normal. (Michael Vassar is one example of a "superclicker".) But it is still true AFAICT that people who click on one problem are more likely than average to click on another.
My best guess is that clickiness has something to do with failure to compartmentalize - missing, or failing to use, the mental gear that lets human beings believe two contradictory things at the same time. Clicky people would tend to be people who take all of their beliefs at face value.
The Hansonian explanation (not necessarily endorsed by Robin Hanson) would say something about clicky people tending to operate in Near mode. (Why?)
The naively straightforward view would be that the ordinary-seeming people who came to the cryonics did not have any extra gear that magically enabled them to follow a short chain of obvious inferences, but rather, everyone else had at least one extra insanity gear active at the time they heard about cryonics.
Is that really just it? Is there no special sanity to add, but only ordinary madness to take away? Where do superclickers come from - are they just born lacking a whole lot of distractions?
What the hell is in that click?
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Comments (400)
That click is cultural. It seems magical because you've acclimated yourself to not encountering shared values with people very often, and so this cryonics gathering was a feast of connections.
I wonder if it ties in to some kind of confidence in your understanding.* If you don't trust your ability to understand a simple argument, you're really quite likely to overrate the strength of your heuristics relative to your reason.
...which sounds a lot like why I'm suspicious of cryonics, on introspection. I really need to run the numbers and see if I can afford it.
* Oh noes! Have I become one of those people with one idea they go back to for everything?
Don't worry, that's practically everybody. Just be aware of it, excuse other people for not getting your big idea, and consider revising your stance in the future.
Thanks - I'll try to think of it that way.
(One thing I was considering as a countermeasure was to imagine it as an analogue to a Short Duration Personal Savior - a ShorDurDivRev (divine revelation), perhaps!)
Beware the double illusion of transparency ?
I wasn't there at the time, but if EY's description is roughly accurate, I suspect the ordinary-seeming woman understood him in the opening anecdote. The specific chain I'm looking at is:
EY: Magic does not exist.
OSW: Science doesn't understand everything?
EY: Ignorance is in mind, not reality.
OSW: Magic is impossible!
I see no way that OSW could deduce this fact about magic unless she compared magic - stuff which you are necessarily ignorant of - to the correct interpretation of EY's point.
Isin't it more sane to donate money to organizations fighting against existential risks rather than spending money on cryonics?
Since most people who donate to fight existential risks don't donate everything they have above subsistance level, there's usually enough money to do both (since Cryonics via life insurance isn't very expensive afaik).
But surely you wouldn't be donating enough to, say, fighting existential risks so that the marginal utility of the next dollar spent there drops below that of the marginal utility spent on cryonics. Not that I'm suggesting that fighting existential risks necessarily has a higher marginal utility than cryonics. Rather, you probably don't have enough money to change the relative rankings, so you should donate to the cause with the highest marginal utility. Not both.
The exception may be donating enough to make sure YOU are reanimated after you die (I don't know what your utility function looks like), but in that case you aren't really donating.
Surely you should be asking about the marginal utility of money spent on eating out before you ask about money spent on cryonics. What is this strange mental accounting where money spent on cryonics is immediately available to be redirected to existential risks, but money spent on burritos or French restaurants or an extra 100sqft in an apartment is not?
I have a theory about this, actually. How it works is: people get paid at the beginning of the month, and then pay their essential bills, food, rent, electricity, insurance, Internet, etc. What happens next is, people have a certain standard of living that they think they're supposed to have, based somewhat on how much money they make, but much more on what all their friends are spending money on. They then go out and buy stuff like fancy dinners and a house in the suburbs and what not, and this spending is not mentally available as something that can be cut back on, because they don't see it as "spending", so much as "things I need to do to maintain my standard of living"; people see it as a much larger burden to write a single check for $2,000 than to spend $7 every day on coffee, because they come out of different mental pools. Anything left over after that gets put into cryonics, or existential risk, or savings, or investments, etc. That's why you see so many more millionaire plumbers than millionaire attorneys, because the attorney has a higher standard of living, and so has less money left over to save.
--Max Weber, Protestant Ethic
We do?
I was going to comment on that, but I don't see any millionaires at all, so I thought I shouldn't.
The main point of "the Millionaire Next Door" is that you might not notice millionaires.
See The Millionaire Next Door, http://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Thomas-Stanley/dp/0671015206 .
It cites statistics, and actually says that there are X millionaire lawyers, and X+Y plumbers? It isn't just giving a lot of anecdotes?
I would be very surprised to hear that, because it implies that one is substantially more likely to become a millionaire by plumbing than by lawyering, since there are ~500,000 plumbers in the US and >1.1million lawyers.
According to wikipedia it (1) generally cites statistics and (2) says that doctors, lawyers, and accountants save a much lower proportion of money than other occupations. google books says that it doesn't mention plumbers at all.
I would guess that pretty much all lawyers permanently employed at BIGLAW are millionaires and pretty much no other lawyers are; but that's probably enough to beat plumbers. I think the other lawyers have a similar income distribution to plumbers.
If you have a sufficiently selfish utility function, it may make sense to spend that extra money on french restaurants and the bigger apartment. But otherwise, yes, the lowest hanging fruit are spending less money on things like going out or new electronic toys.
That seems natural enough to me, it's the net income of the very limited part of you that identifies as "you" because it can sometimes talk and think about abstractions.
The deliberative part of "you" that thinks about cryonics may not be the same part that chooses restaurants, but doesn't it play a role in choosing apartments?
Agreed, but the deliberative part may actually think that the larger and better located apartment contributes more to global utility, at least if you are the head of the Singularity Institute and you just spent the last 6 years living with a wife in 200 square feet.
On the one hand, yes, but on the other hand, I sometimes worry that we're getting a little too cynical around these Hansonian parts.
In any case, cryonics is a one-time expenditure for that part of you. It looms large in the imagination in advance, but afterward the expenditure almost instantly fades into the background of the monthly rent, less salient than burritos.
Cynicism is boring. Build a map that matches the territory. That map looks terribly Hansonian but doesn't have its 'cynical' bit set to 'yes'.
It occurs to me to suggest that donating to both allows you to hedge your bets; one or the other might end up not producing results at all.
Which seems to be a similar impulse to the one causing guess 70% blue and 30% red, though the situation is different enough that it might make sense here.
Yes. Your argument applies to everything money can be spent on, not just cryonics. But unlike most things you can spend money on, cryonics has the advantage of forcing you to care about the future. It provides an incentive to donate to fighting existential risk.
It also provides a personal incentive to hurry the intelligence explosion along so that it occurs before the death of the people signed up for cryonics. [ADDED: I concede that what I just said does not make sense; I went to delete it a few minutes after I submitted it but people had already replied. Please do not reply to this.] In other words, it provides a disincentive to pursue a strategy that discourages or suppresses existentially-risky research (on, e.g., AGI) so that less-risky research represents a larger share of the total research. In other words, it recruits the people most able to understand and to respond effectively to existential risks to spend (collectively) many millions of dollars in such a way that gives them a personal disincentive to pursue what I consider a very worthwhile strategy for addressing existential risks posed by certain lines of scientific research.
Most people who have expressed an opinion seem to believe that there is no stopping or slowing down significantly lines of research that (like AGI) can be continued with just a PC and access to the open scientific literature. But I tend to think it can be stopped or slowed down a great deal if effective people put as much effort into explaining why it is bad as Eliezer and his followers are putting into convincing people to sign up for cryonics.
According to my models, convincing people to sign up for cryonics at the current time does nothing to reduce existential risk. The opposite, in fact.
As far as I can tell, your argument supports the reverse of your conclusion: People signed up for cryonics have less incentive to do fast, risky things. This line of reasoning is sufficiently strange that I call motivated cognition on this one.
Well, what's my personal motivation, then, if I am engaging in motivated cognition?
But I do concede that my comment has a big problem here: "provides a personal incentive to hurry the intelligence explosion along so that it occurs before the death of the people signed up for cryonics" and I would have deleted my comment had you not replied already. Give me a few minutes to try to reconstruct the thinking that led to my conclusion.
One part is that getting people who are living now to hope to live a very long time disincentivizes them to consider strategies in which the singularity happens after they die.
But there was another part ISTR.
We agree that getting people to sign up for cryonics increases their hope for post-singularity existence and thus their likelihood to support singularity-directed research, notwithstanding it doesn't require a singularity to revive a frozen near-defunct body or brain.
Whether that's good or bad depends on your view of whether widespread efforts intending to reach a good singularity are likely to go disastrously wrong. Clearly, in case of widespread popularization of the goal, an enlightened FAI research program needs to spend effort on PR in order to steal funds from more sloppy aspirants. Considering all that, I expect widespread interest and funding for AI research to give only a change in the date, not the quality, of any singularity.
Once there are a few thousand people working on existential risks, the marginal expected utility of recruiting another worker goes down. People start working at cross-purposes because of not knowing enough about each other's plans.
Rather than increasing the number of e-risk workers as fast as possible, the recruiting strategy that minimizes e-risks is to figure out what personal qualities make for the best e-risk workers and differentially to recruit people with those qualities.
And the most decisive personal quality I know about has to do with the "motivational structure" of the prospective worker. what natural human desires and pleasures (and perhaps natural human fears) motivate him or her? Two natural human motivations that cause many of the people currently working on e-risks or currently watching the public discourse about e-risks to persist in these activities are self-interest and altruism.
A lot of recruiting consists of written and oral communications. it is fairly straightforward to tailor the communications in such a way that it is of strong interest to, e.g., people interested in being altruistic while being boring to people motivated by, e.g., their own personal survival. It gets harder the more the reader knows about e-risks and about the singularity, but at present, most very bright people do not know much about these topics.
Consequently, communications that inform people about the singularity should be tailored to be interesting to those with the right motivations.
Since not enough people of sufficiently-high prestige advocate cryonics to make an argument for cryonics by authority persuasive, the only effective way to persuade people to sign up is with an argument on the scientific merits, which entails explaining to them about the singularity. I.e., communications whose purpose is to get people to sign up for cryonics is necessarily also communications that inform people about the singularity -- and this might be its more important effect even if the intent of the author is simply to get people to sign up for cryonics.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I tend to think that any discussion of cryonics I can imagine which is effective at getting people to sign up will tend to recruit the wrong people into the ranks of the singularitarians.
I am struck particularly at the difficultly of getting people to read communications about cryonics without appeal to their interest in their own survival.
And I think it increases existential risk to create communications that are informative about the singularity whose appeal is to the reader's survival interest.
People whose motivation is self-interest have a track record of being easy to control or influence by threats of imprisonment, violence, or other personal hardships. Scientific workers in particular have a track record of being easily cowed by bullies, e.g., government officials and business tycoons. Moreover, the prospective bullies tend to have goals that most people reading this would disapprove of.
There have probably not yet been any instances in which e-risks workers have been influenced or subverted by bullies, but there's a significant chance of it happening during the second phase of the work (when it will become obvious to any intelligent observer that the singularitarians command significant scientific and technical resources) if a significant fraction of singularitarians will have self-interested as their strongest motivation for persisting in their work towards the singularity.
I take my personal history as another piece of evidence for the hypothesis that people should discourage knowledge of the singularity and work on the singularity by people whose motivation for doing so is self-interest. When I was growing up in the 1970s, one of the books in my house, Get Ready for Immortality by Lawrence Lamb, M.D., caused me come to hope to live millions of years. It was not a major theme in my thinking, but it was definitely there. And I do not consider the person I was in my teens (or even my early 20s) to be the sort of person that should be encouraged to learn about and work toward the singularity.
By the time I came upon Eliezer's writings when I was 40 or 41, I had lost any desire to live millions of years. My motivation for trying to understand Eliezer's point about seed AI was to help me predict whether the research I was doing on new programming languages might have far-reaching negative consequences (by giving AGI researchers tools they might otherwise not come to have). (If they did have negative consequences, I meant to leave them unpublished.) I.e., my motivation was to avoid doing harm by not thinking through the consequences of some research I had done for the pleasure of scientific discovery.
And that is an example of the kind of motivation that should IMHO be encouraged. And note that it is quite easy to write in such a way that is boring to the hypothetical reader who is motivated only by maximizing the odds of his or her own survival and interesting to the hypothetical reader who is interested only in learning enough about the likely consequences of his or her behavior (and the behavior of his or her friends and coworkers) to make sure he or she is not unknowingly doing harm.
So, that is a little bit about why I tend not to think that persuading people to sign up for cryonics reduces existential risk. Yes, I see the same positive effects as JGWeissman, angry parsley and Eliezer. But I estimate the negative effects I have just described to outweigh them.
Getting people to sign up for cryonics is certainly not a strategy I would choose if my gaol was to minimize existential risks. (I.e., there are almost certainly better strategies.)
What?! If I do something to increase my chances of being revived given a positive Singularity after my death, then I should be more willing to pursue a strategy that increases the chances of an eventual Singularity being positive at the expense of the chances of a fast Singularity which would occur before my death.
Cryonics, be increasing the time we can wait, reduces the pain of delay.
Based on your premises, don't you mean the opposite of everything you just said?
If people are frozen we can take as much time as we need. If they age and die then we have an incentive to work faster. (Although if you do the math, the current world population is insignificant compared to the potential future of humanity, so cautiousness should win out either way.)
My comment pointed out how cryonics creates a personal selfish reason to care about the future. I'd like for people to base their decisions on altruism, but the fact is that we're only human.
I'm not seeing that there's anything so mysterious here. From your description, to click is to realize an implication of your beliefs so quickly that you aren't conscious of the process of inference as it happens. You add that this inference should be one that most people fail to draw, even if the reasoning is presented to them explicitly.
I expect that, for this to happen, the relevant beliefs must happen to be
cached in a rapidly-accessible part of your mind,
stored in a form such that the conclusion is a very short inferential step beyond them, and
free of any obstructing beliefs.
By an obstructing belief, I don't mean a belief contradicting the other beliefs. I mean a belief that lowers you estimate of the conditional probability of the conclusion that you would otherwise have reached.
When you are trying to induce other people to click, you can do something about (1) and (2) above. You can format the relevant beliefs in the most transparent way possible, and you can use emphasis and repetition to get the beliefs cached.
But if your interlocutors still fail to click, it's probably because (3) didn't happen. That is, it's probably just a special case of the usual reason why people fail to be convinced by an argument, even when they grant the premises. People fail to be convinced because they have other beliefs, which, when taken into account, seem to lower the overall probability of your conclusion. So, typically, a failure to click is no more mysterious than a general failure to be convinced by arguments.
On a more cynical note, I'm pretty sure that the "click" is almost the only decision procedure for the vast majority of people*. When a question arises, one answer will seem to be manifestly the right answer, and the rest will seem obviously wrong. When they change their mind, it will be because another answer abruptly seems to be manifestly the right answer. If no answer clicks for them, they will just chalk the problem up as "mysterious".
*Here I'm using "click" to include inferences that aren't necessarily rare, and which might in fact be very common.
I like this comment but do not know if I agree with it or not. The upvote was for making me stop and think long and hard about the subject. The wheels are still spinning and no conclusion is imminent, but thank you for the thoughts. :)
I've met very few people for whom the concept "simulating consciousness is analogous to simulating arithmetic" is obvious-in-retrospect, even among atheists. A special case of a "generalized anti-zombie" click?
Widespread failure to understand this most basic principle ever drives me crazy and leaves me feeling physically sick. I'd appreciate efforts to raise the sanity waterline for this reason alone.
What if life isn't good?
What if other people dying is good for the survivors?
That appears not to be the case. In general, we want to live and want others to live. Where this does not hold, it is generally viewed as the result of something bad, or as a necessary means to prevent something bad.
If that were the case, it would be an example of preventing something bad.
I'm not quite sure how to assign meaning to a normative counterfactual. Asserting "life is bad" is tantamount to declaring war on existence. Humans have massive, sprawling goal complexes, most of which seem to be predicated on existence. It seems extremely implausible that such goals could be consistent with a preference for non-existence. Consciously stroking yourself into a nihilistic fervor says more about the flexibility of your conscious perception than it does about the ultimate "goodness" of life (related Nesov comment).
It's the "most basic principle ever" because:
But feel free to let me know if you those don't apply to you, so I can file you away as "pure evil".
This is a narrower question that requires answering other questions like "which life?" and "how good?". It can't contradict the premise of life being good, it can only attempt to make it more precise.
One of the things that I've noticed about this is that most people do not expect to understand things. For most people, the universe is a mysterious place filled with random events beyond their ability to comprehend or control. Think "guessing the teacher's password", but not just in school or knowledge, but about everything.
Such people have no problem with the idea of magic, because everything is magic to them, even science.
An anecdote: once, when I still worked as software developer/department manager in a corporation, my boss was congratulating me on a million dollar project (revenue, not cost) that my team had just turned in precisely on time with no crises.
Well, not congratulating me, exactly. He was saying, "wow, that turned out really well", and I felt oddly uncomfortable. After getting off the phone, I realized a day or so later that he was talking about it like it was luck, like, "wow, what nice weather we had."
So I called him back and had a little chat about it. The idea that the project had succeeded because I designed it that way had not occurred to him, and the idea that I had done it by the way I negotiated the requirements in the first place -- as opposed to heroic efforts during the project -- was quite an eye opener for him.
Fortunately, he (and his boss) were "clicky" enough in other areas (i.e., they didn't believe computers were magic, for example) that I was able to make the math of what I was doing click for them at that "teachable moment".
Unfortunately, most people, in most areas of their lives treat everything as magic. They're not used to being able to understand or control anything but the simplest of things, so it doesn't occur to them to even try. Instead, they just go along with whatever everybody else is thinking or doing.
For such (most) people, reality is social, rather than something you understand/ control.
(Side note: I find myself often trying to find a way to express grasp/control as a pair, because really the two are the same. If you really grasp something, you should be able to control it, at least in principle.)
Not usually a fan of your thoughts, but these seem right on the money.
This is overwhelmingly how I perceive most people. This in particular: 'reality is social'.
I have personally traced the difference, in myself, to receiving this book at around the age of three or four. It has illustrations of gadgets and appliances, with cut-out views of their internals. I learned almost as soon as I was capable of learning, that nothing is a mysterious black box, things that seem magical have internal detail, and there are explanations for how they work. Whether or not I had anything like a pre-existing disposition that made me love and devour the book in the first place, I still consider it to have had a bigger impact on my whole world view than anything else I can remember.
This is worth an entire post by itself. Cheers.
Yes, please!
The Inside View says, 'we succeeded because of careful planning of X, Y, and Z, and our own awesomeness.' The Outside View says, 'most large software projects fail, but some succeed anyway.'
What makes you think it was the only one, or one of a few out of many?
The specific project was only relevant because my bosses prior to that point in time already implicitly understood that there was something my team was doing that got our projects done on time when others under their authority were struggling - but they attributed it to intelligence or skill on my part, rather than our methodology/philosophy.
The newer boss, OTOH, didn't have any direct familiarity with my track record, and so didn't attribute the success to me at all, except that obviously I hadn't screwed it up.
Years ago I and three other people were training for a tech support job. Our trainer was explaining something (the tracert command) but I didn't understand it because his explanation didn't seem to make sense. After asking him more questions about it, I realized from his contradictory answers that he didn't understand it either. The reason I mention this is that my three fellow trainees had no problem with his explanation, one even explicitly saying that she thought it made perfect sense.
Looks like he was just repeating various teacher's passwords.
Huh. I guess that if I tell myself, "Most people simply do not expect reality to make sense, and are trying to do entirely different things when they engage in the social activity of talking about it", then I do feel a little less confused.
More precisely, different people are probably using different definitions of "make sense"... and you might find it easier to make sense of if you had a more detailed understanding of the ways in which people "make sense". (Certainly, it's what helped me become aware of the issue in the first place.)
So, here are some short snippets from the book "Using Your Brain For A Change", wherein the author comments on various cognitive strategies he's observed people using in order to decide whether they "understand" something:
Obviously, we are talking mostly about "clicking" being something more like this latter category of sense-making, but the author actually did mention how certain kinds of "fuzzy" understanding would actually be more helpful in social interaction:
Most of the chapter concerned itself with various cognitive strategies of detailed understanding used by a scientist, a pilot, an engineer, and so on, but it also pointed out:
Anyway, that chapter was a big clue for me towards "clicking" on the idea that the first two obstacles to be overcome in communicating a new concept are 1) getting people to realize that there's something to "get", and 2) getting them to get that they don't already "get" it. (And both of these can be quite difficult, especially if the other person thinks they have a higher social status than you.)
Would you recommend that book? ("Using Your Brain For A Change")
Is the rest of it insightful too, or did you quote the only good part?
There are a lot of other good parts, especially if you care more about practice than theory. However, I find that personally, I can't make use of many of the techniques provided without the assistance of a partner to co-ordinate the exercises. It's too difficult to pay attention to both the steps in the book and what's going on in my head at the same time.
I'm still confused, but now my eyes are wide with horror, too. I don't dispute what pjeby said; in retrospect it seems terribly obvious. But how can we deal with it? Is there any way to get someone to start expecting reality to make sense?
I have a TA job teaching people how to program, and I watch as people go from desperately trying to solve problems by blindly adapting example code that they don't understand to actually thinking and being able to translate their thoughts into working, understandable programs. I think the key of it is to be thrust into situations that require understanding instead of just guessing the teacher's password -- the search space is too big for brute force. The class is all hands-on, doing toy problems that keep people struggling near the edge of their ability. And it works, somehow! I'm always amazed when they actually, truly learn something. I think this habit of expecting to understand things can be taught in at least one field, albeit painfully.
Is this something that people can learn in general? How? I consider this a hugely important question.
I wouldn't be surprised if thinking this way about computer programs transfers fairly well to other fields if people are reminded to think like programmers or something like that. There are certainly a disproportionate number of computer programmers on Less Wrong, right?
And those that aren't computer programmers would display a disproportionate amount of aptitude if they tried.
Certainly; I think this is a case where there are 3 types of causality going on:
During my military radio ops course, I realized that the woman teaching us about different frequencies literally thought that 'higher' frequencies were higher off the ground. Like you, I found her explanations deeply confusing, though I suspect most of the other candidates would have said it made sense. (Despite being false, this theory was good enough to enable radio operations - though presumably not engineering).
Thankfully I already had a decent founding in EM, otherwise I would have yet more cached garbage to clear - sometimes it's worse than finding the duplicate mp3s in my music library.
Could you clarify? To properly understand how traceroute works one would need to know about the TTL field in the IP header (and how it's normally decremented by routers) and the ICMP TTL Exceeded message. But I'm not sure that a tech support drone would be expected to understand any of these.
I did learn about this on my own that day, but the original confusion was at a quite different level: I asked whether the times on each line measured the distance between that router and the previous one, or between that router and the source. His answer: "Both." A charitable interpretation of this would be "They measure round trip times between the source and that router, but it's just a matter of arithmetic to use those to estimate round trip times between any two routers in the list" -- but I asked him if this was what he meant and he said no. We went back and forth for a while until he told me to just research it myself.
Edit: I think I remember him saying something like "You're expecting it to be logical, but things aren't always logical".
Well, anything mathematical would be an exception to that, at the least.
If you really grasp something mathematical, you ought to be able to apply it -- at least in principle.
OK but that's not really what "control" normally means, is it? "Manipulate" might be a better word here.
"Manipulate" would also extend the thinking-as-holding metaphor of "grasp".
(I have to admit that I was confused by "control" as well.)
I suspect you need to travel some (most?) of the inferential distance to becoming a rationalist (one way or another) before you can start clicking on ideas and concepts you're hearing for the first time.
Maybe you could devise a click-test and give it to different groups to see what kinds of people click more often?
At age eight? Even I wasn't much of a rationalist until nine or so.
What I had in mind is that people will click more often if they've gone through some of the inferential distance already and are in a mindset in which, when they first encounter cryonics/AI/whatever, it appears obviously/intuitively possible. Which is why you have 25% computer industry people and 25% scientists (i.e. it's obviously not a random sample of people). Scientists are more likely than most people to be atheists, believe in the possibility of AI, etc, and also more likely to click when they first hear about cryonics on the radio.
As you've said, the chain of reasoning followed by a click is very short. But it's only short for those people that don't have other (longer) chains of reasoning and beliefs that seem to contradict the original statement. And in order to connect the short chain, you have to dissolve the long one first. It seems to me that people need to have already accepted to a certain extent the naturalistic/scientific worldview in order to click immediately on cryonics.
Now, I'm not sure how much of this applies to children, but I don't see why kids can't have a similar (albeit based on simpler reasoning chains) mindset, i.e. they already accept most of the prerequisites for cryonics.
That's weird. Do you actually remember your thoughts from that age?
I remember writing absolutely unthinkably awful science fiction, and reading Jerry Pournelle's A Step Farther Out.
I wonder if we should just use the word Bayesian and drop "Rationalist". It has an entrenched meaning opposite to empiricist. We can also use words like Skeptic, Scientists, Popperian, and the like in their traditional meanings.
I think the traditional "rationalist/empiricist" dichotomy is most likely a confusion. I don't mind at all if we end up helping to displace this terminology by spreading our sense of "rationalist".
But no one can be a Bayesian except in the statistical-method-advocacy sense of the term.
Depending on whether my "clicks" and EY's "clicks" are the same, this isn't true. My studies in Math and Computer Science were full of clicks and the people around me would click at different points in the more complicated Math classes. Some of these people were certainly not rationalist. They were very smart, but certainly not rationalist.
I'm not sure what you mean by "clicks" in Math classes. It looks like you're using "click" for "understand" or "gain insight"? Whether and when you click in complicated Math classes depends on how you manage to grasp math concepts and follow and connect them logically (or something of this sort). Whereas EY defines "click" as a "a very short chain of reasoning", which in the minds of most people gets derailed. What I'm suggesting is that it gets derailed by other preconceptions that interfere with the short reasoning chain.
Sort of, but on a whole different scale than I use for the words "understand" or "gain insight." So much so that I would never switch one word out for the other.
For me, "click" is to "understand" as "fly" is to "jump." You could say that flight is a form of jumping, but all the details are different and they have drastically different results.
Yeah, that isn't how I am using click at all.
Or perhaps not travel far enough away.
Mmm... I am a click-hunter. I keep pestering a topic and returning over and over until I feel it click. I can understand something well enough to start accurately predicting results but still refuse to be satisfied until I feel it click. Once it clicks I move on.
You and I may be describing different types of clicks, however. Here is a short list of things I have observed about the clicks in my life.
The minor step from not having a subject click and having a subject click is enormous. It is the single greatest leap in knowledge I will likely experience in a subject matter. I may learn more in one click than with a whole semester of absorbing knowledge from a book.
Clicks don't translate well. It is hard to describe the actual path up to and through a click.
What causes a subject to click for me will not cause it to click for another. Clicks seem to be very personal experiences, which is probably why it is so hard to translate.
Clicks tend to be most noticeable with large amounts of critical study. I assume that day-in-day-out clicks are not terribly noticeable but I suspect that they exist. A simple example I can think of is suddenly discovering a quicker route through town.
Clicks do not require large amounts of critical study, however, as I have had clicks drop on me from nowhere with all of the answers to a particular problem laying around in plain sight.
Once a click happens, the extra perspective appears obviously true. Clicks are often accompanied with phrases like, "Oh!" or "Why didn't I see this before?!"
Even for complicated subjects, it takes trivial amounts of conversation to learn if the subject has clicked in another person. Once you "get it," other people who get it know you got it.
Some people are much better at producing clicks in others.
Some people have no idea what a click is and have never felt one. Some of these people are very smart, but I seem to notice that they have a weakness for abstract thought or are more likely to be satisfied with stopping once they have accurate predictors. Perhaps learning why the model ended up being that particular model is extraneous and not needed to predict and so is an unwanted extra step.
Mind-dumping helps things click. I find that if I just blah on a page, start over and blah again, and repeat the process a click will probably happen at some point in the cycle.
There are topics that have not clicked for me yet but I suspect they would if I kept pushing them.
Perspectives from other people help clicks happen. Listening to someone else struggle to understand the concept helps clicks happen.
More so than with other descriptors of internal mental state, I wonder which people saying "click" mean the same thing.
I feel quite satisfied when I change my mind as a result of a new insight, but also a little hesitant to consider the case closed until time passes - I feel apprehensive that another insight+reversal may follow in the consequent mental shifting. Is that a "click"?
Maybe, but it doesn't really match my feelings when I get a click. This doesn't mean you are I have better or worse clicks. It could just mean we react to them differently.
I think if there is a difference between your click and mine it is that my clicks tend to be reactions to things generally considered to be factual or true but something I have trouble understanding. Clicks tend not to be brand new discoveries but rather a full, complete understanding of someone else's discovery. The easiest example is from mathematics. A complicated piece of linear algebra is True but I don't fully Get It until it clicks.
I found this:
To be very true.
Many times in my classes I have barely grasped what the professor was saying throughout the year only to click the subject at a later time when a fellow student explained it to me in a way that grokked. Whenever this happens, I feel like I have learned more in that brief period then in the entire class before then.
This is actually how I approach difficult textbooks. I read through as much as I can before I just totally collapse in confusion, look up related information on the internet, take a few days off, and then go back through from the beginning. The textbook usually makes vastly more sense then, as all the disjointed pieces come together in a way that's obvious in retrospect.
This is how I was able to read through and understand an algorithms textbook in junior high, even though it terrifies and befuddles people in their third year of college. It's just not that hard if you attack it in multiple passes, because multipass studying is much more likely to get you to the click of understanding.
OK, I'm not sure I experience clicks the way you do. Thinking for a bit I realize I integrated a fairly decent sized insight in a fairly short amount of time reading this blog post; does the same happen to you?
Erm, not really, no. I learned enough about a subject to regurgitate what someone else has said and can probably start making inferences from the subject material I know, but no click. But this isn't a field I know anything about. I have no way of knowing if anything he wrote is likely or unlikely to be true. It sounds good, but that isn't enough for a click.
The best example of a click I can think of is linear algebra. As soon as I finally got my mind wrapped around 3D matrices and could "visualize" it the whole subject clicked and now 4D matrices, 5D, 2x1, rotations, and pretty much everything else was a cake walk.
Comparing that experience to reading this blog, I know almost nothing more now than when I started. I know no more facts; I know only a few theories; I know a few places to look if the subject interests me later.
That being said, the author of the post likely had a click one day when thinking about sexual reproduction. The end result of that click is the post that he wrote.
But don't forget that "click" is a fuzzy word. Even if we came up with a clear definition another word would slip into its place because this is not a universal experience. It seems to be common enough to get a word but different enough that we are willing to debate what it means for hours. :)
I've actually heard that theory before.
I've often described learning in terms of 'clicking'.
It's most memorable to me when thinking about hard problems that I can't solve right away. It feels like something finally puts the last piece of the puzzle in place and for the first time I can 'see' the answer.
When trying to teach people, I've noticed that some people have a very obvious 'click response'- they'll light up at a distinct moment and just get it from then on.
Other people show no sign of this, yet claim to learn. I still haven't figured out what is going on here. The possibilities I can think of are: 1) Their learning process involves no clicking 2) They hide the click to make it sound like they've known it all along because they'd be embarassed at how late their click is 3) They're faking it, and don't really get it.
For me though, learning about cryonics and the intelligence explosion idea didn't seem very 'click like' since it just seemed obviously true the first time I heard about it, rather than there being a delay that makes the evaporation of confusion more satisfying. I suspect the learning mechanism is actually the same though.
How about 4) they don't really get it, and just think they do, or 5) they don't realize there's anything to "get" in the first place, because they think knowledge is a mysterious thing that you memorize and regurgitate. I think that's actually the most common case, but the others are perhaps plausible as well.
Your 5) seems the best fit.
Here's the facial expression I've noticed: Head tilts upward but off to the side, eyes rolling upward. Followed by quick head nod downward, as if to say "Yes" — It's almost always followed with an apt question.
I do this. But of course someone could fake it. One sign is they add nothing to the conversation after it. You'll notice that. If you aren't sure quiz them.
There's also the valuable trait where, between being presented with an argument and going "click", one's brain cleanly goes "duhhh", rather than producing something that sounds superficially like reasoning.
I greatly value that one. I'm in the (apparently small) group of people who, when presented with a statistics/probability problem, will say, "Clearly the solution involves math. The answer is to consult someone who knows how to solve the problem." rather than come up with the wrong answer that "feels right" or alternatively knowing how to find the right answer.
Does that group also include those for whom 'consult someone who knows' wouldn't occur until 'learn how to do it' was thoroughly ruled out?
Hm, interesting point. I'm not sure I have this trait, because instead of thinking "duhhh" when I hear a well-reasoned and compelling argument, I like to make a few sanity checks and run it past my skepticism meter before allowing the clicking mechanism to engage. I wonder if that's ever produced results; at any rate, I feel like it's my duty to keep good epistemic hygiene, though my skeptical reasoning might be superficial. For this reason it normally takes a few seconds before I allow things to click, which slows conversation a tad. Perhaps I should tentatively accept the premises of hypotheses first and then be skeptical later, when I have time and resources?
Also, I wonder to what extent the desire to be skeptical is more related to the desire not to appear gullible than to a desire to find truth.
I think "clicky" people are people who are not emotionally vested in their beliefs.
Many people need their beliefs to be true in order to feel like they are valuable and worthwhile people.
Clicky people simply don't need that (or at least need that to a lesser extent). Instead, clicky people need to be right whether or not that means they were initially wrong.
It sounds like it might have something to do with what Carol Dweck describes as the "Growth Mindset", as opposed to the "Fixed Mindset".
Here's something I wrote about it a couple years ago based on a Nigel Holmes graphic (still one of the most popular posts on my blog):
http://michaelgr.com/2007/04/15/fixed-mindset-vs-growth-mindset-which-one-are-you/
Interesting. I remember my brother saying, "I want to be frozen when I die, so I can be brought back to life in the future," when he was child (somewhere between ages 9-14, I would guess). Probably got the idea from a cartoon show. I think the idea lost favor with him when he realized how difficult a proposition reanimating a corpse really was (he never thought about the information capture aspect of it.)
I think this is the primary factor. I've got a pretty amusing story about this.
Last week I met a relatively distant relative, a 15 year old guy who's in a sports oriented high school. He plays football, has not much scientific, literary or intellectual background, and is quite average and normal in most conceivable ways. Some TV program on Discovery was about "robots", and in a shortly unfolding 15 minute spontaneous conversation I've managed to explain him the core problems of FAI, without him getting stuck at any points of my arguments. I'm fairly sure that he had no previous knowledge about the subject.
First I made a remark in connection to the TV program's poetic question about what if robots will be able to get most human work done; I said that if robots get the low wage jobs, humans would eventually get paid more on average, and the problem is only there when robots can do everything humans can and somehow end up actually doing all those things.
Then he asked if I think they'll get that smart, and I answered that it's quite possible in this century. I explained recursive self-improvement in two sentences, to illustrate the reasons why they could potentially get very, very smart in a small amount of time. I talked about the technology that would probably allow AIs to act upon the world with great efficiency and power. Next, he said something like "that's good, wouldn't AI's would be a big help, like, they will invent new medicine?" At this point I was pretty amused. I assured him that AIs indeed have great potentials. I talked then very shortly about most basic AI topics, providing the usual illustrations like Hollywood AIs, smiley-tiled solar systems and foolish programmers overlooking the complexity of value. I delineated CEV in a simplified "redux" manner, focusing on the idea that we should optimally just extract all relevant information from human brains by scanning them, to make sure nothing we care about is left out. "That should be a huge technical problem, to scan that much brains", he said.
And now:
"But if the AI gets so potent, would not it be a problem anyway, even if it's perfectly friendly, that it can do everything much better than humans, and we'll get bored?"
"Hahh, not at all. If you think that getting all bored and unneeded is bad, then it is a real preference inside your head. It'll be taken into account by the AI, and it will make sure it'll not pamper you excessively."
"Ah, that sounds pretty reasonable".
Now, all of this happened in the course of roughly 15 minutes. No absurdity heuristic, no getting lost, no objections; he just took everything I said at face value, assuming that I'm more knowledgeable on these matters, and I was in general convinced that nothing I explained was particularly hard to grasp. He asked relevant questions and was very interested in what I said.
Some thoughts why this was possible:
The guy belongs to a certain social strata in Hungary, namely to those who newly entered the middle class by free entrepreneurship that became a possibility after the country switched to capitalism. At first, the socialist regime repressed religion and just about every human rights, then eased up, softened, and became what's known as the "happiest barrack". People became unconcerned with politics (which they could not influence) and religion (which was though of as a highly personal matter that should not be taken to public), they just focused on their own wealth and well-being. I'm convinced that the parents of the guy care zero about any religion, the absence of religion, doctrine, ideology or whatever. They just work to make a living and don't think about lofty matters, leaving their son ideologically perfectly intact. Just like my own parents.
Actually, AI is not intrinsically abstract or hard to digest; my interlocutor knew what an AI is, even if from movies, and probably watched just enough Discovery to have a sketchy picture about future technologies. The mind design space argument is not that hard (he had known about evolution because it's taught in school. He immediately agreed that AIs can be much smarter than humans because if we wait a million years, maybe humans can also become much smarter, so it's technically possible), and the smiley-tiled solar system is an entertaining and effective explanation about morality. I think that Eliezer has put extreme amounts of effort to maximize the chance that his AI ideas will get transmitted even to people who are primed or biased against AI or at risk of motivated skepticism. So far, I've had great success using his parables, analogues and ways of explanation.
My perceived status as an "intellectual" made him accept my explanations at face value. He's a football player in a smallish countryside city and I'm a serious college student in the capital city (it's good he doesn't know how lousy a student I am). Still, I do not think this was a significant factor. He probably does not talk about AI among football players, but being a male he has some basic interests in futuristic or gadgety subjects.
In the end, it probably all comes down to lacking some specific ways of craziness. Cryonics seemed normal on that convention Eliezer attended, and I'm sure every idea that is epistemically and morally correct can in principle be a so-called normal thing. Besides this guy, I've even had full success lecturing a 17 year old metal drummer on AI and SIAI - and he was situated socioeconomically very similarly to the first guy, and neither he had any previous knowledge.
I had essentially this conversation with my sister-in-law's boyfriend (Canadian art student in his early twenties) just about four weeks ago. Didn't get to the boredom question, but did talk a bit about cryonics. Took about 25 minutes.
Surprise level went down from gi-normous to merely moderate at this point.
But wouldn't the knowledge that the AI could potentially do your work be psychologically harmful?
This is a great post, and I'd be interested in seeing you write out a fuller version of what you said to your relative as a top level post, something like "Friendly AI and the Singularity explained for adolescents."
Also, do you speak English as a second language? If so, I am especially impressed with your writing ability.
On a tangent, am I the only one that doesn't like the usage of boy, girl, or child to describe adolescents? It seems demeaning, because adolescents are not biologically children, they've just been defined to be children by the state. I suppose I'm never going to overturn that usage, but I'd like to know if there is some reason why I shouldn't be bothered by the common usage of the words for children.
You're not. I find it demeaning and more than a little confusing.
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 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!
Going to quote this.
And this.
It seems to me that you can't be more specific because there is not anything there to be more specific about.
What the hell, I'll play devil's advocate.
Right now, we're all going to die eventually, so we can make tradeoffs between life and other values that we still consider to be essential. But when you take away that hard stop, your own life's value suddenly skyrockets - given that you can almost certainly, eventually, erase any negative feelings you have about actions done today, it becomes hard to justify not doing horrible things to save one's own life if one was forced to.
Imagine Omega came to you and said, "Cryonics will work; you will be resurrected and have the choice between a fleshbody and simulation, and I can guarantee you live for 10,000 years after that. However, for reasons I won't divulge, this is contingent upon you killing the next 3 people you see."
Well, shit. Let the death calculus begin.
I don't worry about this for the same reason that Eliezer doesn't worry about waking up with a blue tentacle for his arm.
Thanks for that generous spirit. But fine: You see a woman being dragged into an alley by a man with a gun.
Scenario A) You have terminal brain cancer and you have 3 months to live. You read that morning that scientists have learned several new complications arising from freezing a brain.
Scenario B) Your cryonics arrangements papers went through last night. You read that morning that scientists have successfully simulated a dog's brain in hardware after the dog has been cryogenically frozen for a year.
Now what?
Obviously, you dial 911 on your cell phone. (Or whatever the appropriate emergency number is in your area.)
The generous spirit overfloweth. You don't have a cell phone. Or it's broken.
Well, it's not like I have much of a chance of saving the woman. He has a gun, and I don't. Whether the woman gets shot is entirely up to the man with the gun. If I try to interfere (and I haven't contacted the police yet), I think that I'm as likely to make things worse than I am to help. For example, the man with the gun might panic if it seems like he's losing control of the situation. I'm also physically weaker than most men, so the chances of my managing to overpower him with my bare hands are pretty small.
So, either way, I probably won't try to be Batman.
This strikes me as purposefully obtuse. Does cryonics increase the present value of future expected life? I think it does. Does that increase affect decisions where we risk our life? I think it does; do you agree?
He was just responding to the specific scenario you posited. The fact that you had the broader issue of the effect of cryonics on the value of life at the forefront of your mind does not mean that his failure to comment on it is evidence of purposeful obtuseness.
Yes, I basically agree; I was mostly nitpicking the specific scenario instead of addressing the issue.
If I modify the scenario a bit and say that the assailant has a knife instead of a gun (and my phone's batteries are dead), then things are different. If he has a knife, intervening is still dangerous, but it's much easier to save the woman - all I need to do is put some distance between the two so that the woman can run away. I might very well be seriously injured or killed in the process, but I can at least count on saving the woman from whatever the assailant had in store for her. (This is probably the least convenient possible world that you wanted.)
So, yes, I'd be much more likely to play hero against a knife-wielding assailant if I had brain cancer than if I were healthy and had heard about a major cryonics breakthrough.
if you live in the sorts of neighborhoods where women get dragged into alleys not having a gun seems pretty negligent.
You make a valid theoretical point, but as a matter of contingent fact, the only consequence I see is that people signed up will strongly avoid risks of having their brains splattered. Less motorcycle riding, less joining the army, etc.
Making people more risk-averse might indeed give them pause at throwing themselves in front of cars to save a kid, but:
Snap judgments are made on instinct at a level that doesn't respond to certain factors; you wouldn't be any less likely to react that way if you previously had the conscious knowledge that the kid had leukemia and wouldn't be cryopreserved.
In this day and age, risking your life for someone or something else with conscious premeditation does indeed happen even to transhumanists, but extremely rarely. The fringe effect of risk aversion among people signed up for cryonics isn't worth consigning all of their lives to oblivion.
You seem to have two objections to cryonics:
Cryonics won't work.
Life extension is bad.
#1 is better addressed by the giant amount of information already written on the subject.
For #2 I'd like to quote a bit of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom:
Even if you don't think life extension technologies are a good thing, it's only a matter of time before almost everyone thinks they are. Whatever part of "humanity" you value more than life will be gone forever.
ETA: Actually, there is an out: if you build FAI or some sort of world government and it enforces 20th century life spans on people. I can't say natural life spans because our lives were much shorter before modern sanitation and medicine.
For #2, there's also Nick Bostrom's Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant.
Doesn't this argument imply that we should self-modify to become monomaniacal fitness-maximizers, devoting every quantum of effort towards the goal of tiling the universe with copies of ourselves? Hey, if you don't, someone else will! Natural selection marches on; it's only a matter of time.
I find the likelihood of someone eventually doing this successfully to be very scary. And more generally, the likelihood of natural selection continuing post-AGI, leading to more Hansonian/Malthusian futures.
-Longer life has never been given; it has always been taken. There is no giver.
-"Enough is enough" is sour grapes - "I probably don't have access to living forever, so it's easier to change my values to be happy with that than to want yet not attain it." But if it were a guarantee, and everyone else was doing it (as they would if it were a guarantee), then this position would be the equivalent to advocating suicide at some ridiculously young age in the current era.
I assert that the more extremely the idea "life is good, death is bad" is held, the more benefit other valuable parts of our humanity are rendered. I can't be more specific.
I'm not quite convinced of the merits of investing in cryonics at this point, though "enough is enough" does not strike me as a particularly salient argument either.
In terms of weighing the utility to me based on some nebulous personal function: Cryonics has an opportunity cost in terms of direct expenses and additionally in terms of my social interactions with other people. Both of these seem to be nominal, though the perhaps $300 or so dollars a year could add quite a bit of utility to my current life as I live on about $7K per year. Though I very well may die today, not having spent any of that potential money.
On the other side being revived in the distant future could be quite high in terms of personal utility. Though, I have no reason at all to believe the situation will be agreeable; in other words, permanent death very well could be for the best. I would imagine reviving a person from vitrification would be a costly venture even barring future miracle technology. Revival is not currently possible and there is no reason to think the current processes are being done in any sort of optimal way. At the very least, the cost of creating the tech to revive people will be expensive. Future tech or not, I see it likely that revival will come at some cost with perhaps no choice given to me in the matter. I see this as a likely possibility (at least more likely than a benevolent AI utopia) as science has never fundamentally made people better (more rational?)- so far at least; it certainly ticks forward and may improve the lives of some people, but they are all still fundamentally motivated by the same vestigial desires and all have the same deficiencies as before. Given our nature, I see the most likely outcome, past the novelty of the first couple of successful attempts, being some quid pro quo.
Succinctly, my projection of the most likely state of the world in which I would be revived is the same as today though with more advanced technology. Very often the ones to pioneer new technology aren't scrupulous. I very well may choose a non existence to one of abject suffering or one where my mind may be used to hurt others, etc. This would be an optimization for the worst case scenario.
This is not true of all non-compartmentalizers - just the ones you have noticed and remember. Rational non-compartmentalizers simply hold on to that puzzle piece that doesn't fit until they either
determine where it goes;
determine that it is not from the right puzzle; or
reshape it to correctly fit the puzzle.
(Edit: after having written this entire giant thing, I notice you saying that this was just a "why are some people not interested in cryo" comment, whereas I very much am trying to change your mind. I don't like trying to change people's minds without warning (I thought we were having that sort of discussion, but apparently we aren't), so here's warning.)
You're aware that your life expectancy is about 4 times that of the people who built the pyramids, even the Pharoahs, right? That assertion seems to basically be slapping all of your ancestors in the face. "I don't care that you fought and died for me to have a longer, better life; you needn't have bothered, I'm happy to die whenever". Seriously: if natural life span is good enough for you, start playing russian roulette once a year around 20 years old; the odds are about right for early humans.
As a sort-of aside, I honestly don't see a lot of difference between "when I die is fine" and just committing suicide right now. Whatever it is that would stop you from committing suicide should also stop you from wanting to die at any point in the future.
I'm aware this is a minority view, but that doesn't necessarily make it any less sensible; insert historical examples of once-popular-but-wrong views here.
Then they've failed at the actual task, which is to make all of your beliefs fit with reality.
My values are part of reality. Some of them are more important than others. Some of them contradict each other. Knowing these things is part of what lining my beliefs up with reality means: if my map of reality doesn't include the fact that some of my values contradict, it's a pretty bad map.
You seem to have confused people who are trying to force their beliefs to line up with each other (an easy path to crazy, because you can make any belief line up with any other belief simply by inserting something crazy in the middle; it's all in your head after all) with people with people who are trying to force their beliefs to line up with reality. It's a very different process.
Part of reality is that one of my most dominant values, one so dominant that almost no other values touch its power, is the desire to keep existing and to keep the other people I care about existing. I'm aware that this is selfish, and my compromise is that if reviving me will use such resources that other people would starve to death or something, I don't want to be revived (and I believe my cryo documents specify this; or maybe not, it's kind of obvious, isn't it??). I don't have any difficulty lining up this value with the rest of my values; except for pretty landscapes, everything I value has come from other humans.
In some sense, I don't try to line this, or any other value, up with reality; I'm basically a moral skeptic. I have beliefs that are composed of both values ("death is bad") and statements about reality ("cryo has a better chance of saving me from death than cremation") such that the resulting belief ("cryo is good") is subservient to both matching up with reality (although I doubt anyone will come up with evidence that cryo is less likely to keep you alive than cremation) and my values, but having values and conforming my beliefs with reality are totally separate things.
-Robin
This is the Reversal test.
The post "Reason as memetic immune disorder" was related. I'll quote teasers so that you'll read it:
And my comment there:
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.
In some piece of fiction (I think it was Orion's Arm, but the closest I can find is http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45b3daabb2329 and the reference to "the Herimann-Glauer-Yudkowski relation of inclusive retrospective obviousness") I saw the idea that one could order qualitatively-smarter things on the basis of what you're calling "clicks". Specifically, that if humans are level 1, then the next level above that is the level where if you handed the being the data on which our science is built, all the results would click immediately/be obvious.
I've seen it asserted that humans are essentially "Turing complete" with respect to intelligence; anything that can be understood by any intelligence can be understood by a non-broken human, given enough time and attention. I'm on the fence about that, frankly; there's a lot of stuff that I have real trouble understanding, despite being decently bright by most standards. But if there's such a thing as real quantitative (rather than qualitative) differences in intelligence, it seems to me that "clicks" are at the core of what such a thing would look like from the outside (not what it would be internally; no idea about that, of course).
-Robin
This post, in addition to being a joy to read, contains one particular awesome insight:
Here's some confirmation: I must have at least some clickiness, since I "got" the intelligence explosion/FAI/transhumanism stuff pretty much immediately, despite not having been raised on science fiction.
And, it turns out: I hate, hate, HATE compartmentalization. Just hate it -- in pretty much all its forms. For example, I have always despised the way schools divide up learning into different "classes", which you're not supposed to relate to each other. (It's particularly bad at the middle/high school level, where, if you dare to ask why you shouldn't be able to study both music and drama, or both French and Spanish, they look at you with a puzzled expression, as though such thoughts had occurred to no human being before.) I hate C.P. Snow's goddamned "Two Cultures". I hate the way mathematicians in different areas use the exact same concepts and pretend they don't by employing different notation and terminology. I hate the way music theorists invent separate theoretical universes for different historical periods.
In general, don't get me started on "separate magisteria"....
Eliezer, you're seriously onto something here.
Interesting. Eliezer took some X years to recognize that even "normal looking" persons can be quick on the uptake? ;)
I guess it has a bit deeper explanation than that. I think clickiness happens if two people managed to build very similar mental models and they are ready to manipulate and modify models incrementally. Once the models are roughly in sync, it takes very little time to communicate and just slight hints can create the right change in the conversation partner's model, if he is ready to update.
I think a lot of us has been trained hard to stop model building at certain points. There is definitely a personal difference between people on how much do they care about taboos the society imposes on them which can result in mental red lights: "Don't continue building that model! It's dangerous!" This is what I think Eliezer's notion of "compartmentalization" refers to.
A lot of intelligent people have much less brakes and generally used to model building and do this uninhibitedly, can maintain several models and have fun doing that.
But in general, most people are lazy model builder, they build their models once and stick to it, or just find rationalizations to cut down on "mental effort" of generating and incrementally updating models.
However, I don't think that brakes are the only reason people don't click. If I just don't know how to build the right model (miss the know-how, experience, etc.) I won't click regardless.
For example I am not a musician and if I found it hard to have conversations with experienced musicians over music. Musicians among themselves can build very quickly models of musical concepts and click with each other. I can try to be maximally open minded, I won't manage to click. I simply fail the necessary skills to build the required models.
I have what I hope is an interesting perspective here - I'm a super-not-clicker. I had to be dragged through most of the sequences, chipping away one dumb idea after another, until I Got It. I recognize this as basically my number one handicap. Introspecting about what causes it, I'll back Eliezer's compartmentalization idea.
For me, input flows into categorized and contextual storage. I can access it, but I have to look (and know to look, which I won't if it's not triggered). This is severe enough to impact my memory; I find I'm relying on almost-stigmergy, to-do-list cues activated by context, and I can literally slip out of doing one thing and into another if my contextual cues are off.
I think this is just my problem, but I wonder if it's an exaggerated form of the way other people can just divert facts into a box and sit on them.
Wow - you Got It after a lot of hard work? That must put you in the bottom 99.9% of all rationalists! I think you might be suffering from a bit of underconfidence here.
More like a lot of small insights. Clicks - but with all the data "in cache", as loaded up by you and neatly lined up to connect.
I don't think I'm "the worstest rationalist ever", just that I have a major problem clicking spontaneously from raw data. This seems to me to be the key skill of insight - drawing together a lot of local understandings into a global explanatory pattern. If I could crack this, I think my functional IQ would go up quite a bit.
Does anyone know if Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking is a good book?
http://www.amazon.com/Blink-Power-Thinking-Without/dp/0316172324
Amazon.com Review
Blink is about the first two seconds of looking--the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid storytelling. Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers to think small and focus on the meaning of "thin slices" of behavior. The key is to rely on our "adaptive unconscious"--a 24/7 mental valet--that provides us with instant and sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea.
Gladwell includes caveats about leaping to conclusions: marketers can manipulate our first impressions, high arousal moments make us "mind blind," focusing on the wrong cue leaves us vulnerable to "the Warren Harding Effect" (i.e., voting for a handsome but hapless president). In a provocative chapter that exposes the "dark side of blink," he illuminates the failure of rapid cognition in the tragic stakeout and murder of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx. He underlines studies about autism, facial reading and cardio uptick to urge training that enhances high-stakes decision-making. In this brilliant, cage-rattling book, one can only wish for a thicker slice of Gladwell's ideas about what Blink Camp might look like. --Barbara Mackoff
I enjoyed Blink. You can read some essays by the author here - if you get a lot out of them, you'll probably react similarly to the book.
I've got an audio copy and have listened to it several times. It's definitely worth a look. I enjoyed it more than 'tipping point' but I did read blink first.
I haven't read it, so I can't comment directly on it.
But you should probably know that Gladwell has been criticized a lot for un-scientific methodology and for turning interesting anecdotes and "just-so" stories into generalizations and supposed "laws" (without much evidence).
The most recent example of high profile criticism of Gladwell is probably this review by Steven Pinker: Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective
I don't know if this criticism applies to Blink, though, but if you read it, your BS detector should probably be turned up a notch.
I liked it. The promotional material and summaries of it don't do justice to the content, I think, though. The book has many examples of how people who are experts at things can make good snap judgments in their domains of expertise, but it is not about how any normal person can make great decisions without thinking about them.
Also, Malcolm Gladwell could write a cookbook and make it the most entertaining thing you'll read all year.
Jon Finkel is probably the world's best Magic player. However, he is not good at explaining how to make correct decisions when playing; to him, the right play is simply obvious, and he doesn't even notice all the wrong ones. His skill is almost entirely unconscious.
Reminds me of Marion Tinsley, the greatest checkers player ever. He lost 7 games out of thousands in his 45 year career of playing for the World Championship, two of them to the program that would eventually go on to solve checkers. (That excludes his early years studying the game.) He was arguably the most dominant master of any game, ever. He, too, couldn't explain his skill.
Do they still have World Championships in checkers now the game is understood to be a somewhat more complex tic-tac-toe variant?
The Harding hate is sadly predictable. Harding is so abused by people who nothing about the man. Historians hate him because they have a bias toward hyperactive presidents like TR and FDR.
Yes, Harding was prone to verbal gaffes, and had a few scandals, but he was basically a solid leader, ahead of his time in many ways, like in civil rights.
Edit: Okay, you've given good reasons.
Yes, and Wilson is always in the top 10, and he suspended habeus corpus and took political prisoners (mostly socialists and feminists).
If you look at the list, you can see that historians tend to favor the politicians that took big dramatic actions, started wars, led imperially, etc. Theodore Roosevelt is also always near the top, and he basically advocated empire building and racist immigration policies. Historians are just awful drama queens mostly.
There's a pretty good argument to make for Lincoln as our worst President, too. He's the only President under which we had a civil war!
Is this really relevant ...
Hey, we're trying to get less wrong here.... :3
well in that case, can you explain that emoticon (:3)? I have yet to hear any explanation that makes sense :)
Sure. The cat face emoticon is a reference to an anime trope. When a character is being deliberately mischievous, or slightly bad in some way, they're often shown with the "cat face" (If you want to see an example, go to the Banned Wiki and search "cat smile". I daren't link there. ). It was adopted as an emoticon since the "mouth" of the cat face is essentially a sideways 3. In the west it is usually used to indicate that one is joking lightheartedly, using a bad pun, or alternately, to indicate that one isn't really trying to troll.
As far as I know, the idea that there are organizations capable of reading overwritten data off of a hard drive is an urban legend. See http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/overwritten-data-gutmann.html
I think I saw that paper before, either on here or on Hacker News, and it was replied to by someone who claimed to be from a data-recovery service that could and did use electron microscopes to retrieve the info, albeit very expensively.
EDIT: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=511541
I would be more inclined to take ErrantX seriously if he said what company he works for, so I could do some investigation. You would think that if they regularly do this sort of thing, they wouldn't mind a link. The "expensive" prices he quotes actually seem really low. DriveSavers charges more than $1000 to recover data off of a failed hard drive, and they don't claim to be able to recover overwritten data. Given all of that, I tend to think he is either mistaken (he does say it isn't really his field), or is lying.
Plus, he says it would take them a month. How could they possibly charge only 1000 for a month of anything, even computer time?
I agree.
I remember that the c't, an excellent German computer magazine, around 2005 ran a test with once-zeroed hard-drives: They sent it to a lot of companies to recover the data, but all of them refused to give a quote, saying that the task was impossible.
Most of these companies manage to recover data from technically defect hard-drives after mechanical failures, and it costs several thousand dollars, but none of them were ready to help in case of zeroed out drives.
I had a funny click with my girlfriend earlier this evening. I suggested that she should sign up for cryonics at some point soon, and I was surprised that she was against the idea. In response to her objections, I explained it was vitrification and not freezing, etc. etc. but she wasn't giving me any rational answers, until she said that she really wanted to see the future, but she also wanted to watch the future unfold.
She thought by cryonics that I meant right now, Futurama style. After a much needed clarification she immediately agreed that cryonics was a good idea.
I am puzzled by Eliezer's confidence in the rationality of signing up for cryonics given he thinks it would be characteristic of a "GODDAMNED SANE CIVILIZATION". I am even more puzzled by the commenters overwhelming agreement with Eliezer. I am personally uncomfortable with cryonics for the two following reasons and am surprised that no one seems to bring these up.
(a) Have my life support system turned off and die peacefully.
(b) Keep the life support system going but subsequently give up all autonomy over my life and body and place it entirely in the hands of others who are likely not even my immediate kin. I could be made to put up with immense suffering either due to technical glitches which are very likely since this is a very nascent area, or due to willful malevolence. In this case I would very likely choose (a).
Note that in addition to prolonged suffering where I am effectively incapable of pulling the plug on myself, there is also the chance that I would be an oddity as far as future generations are concerned. Perhaps I would be made a circus or museum exhibit to entertain that generation. Our race is highly speciesist and I would not trust the future generations with their bionic implants and so on to even necessarily consider me to be of the same species and offer me the same rights and moral consideration.
Last but not the least is a point I made as a comment in response to Robin Hanson's post. Robin Hanson expressed a preference for a world filled with more people with scarce per-capita resources compared to a world with fewer people with significantly better living conditions. His point was that this gives many people the opportunity to "be born" who would not have come into existence. And that this was for some reason a good thing. I suspect that Eliezer too has a similar opinion on this, and this is probably another place we widely differ.
I couldn't care less if I weren't born. As the saying goes, I have been dead/not existed for billions of years and haven't suffered the slightest inconvenience. I see cryonics and a successful recovery as no different from dying and being re-born. Thus I assign virtually zero positives to being re-born, while I assign huge negatives to 1 and 2 above.
We are evolutionarily driven to dislike dying and try to postpone it for as long as possible. However I don't think we are particularly hardwired to prefer this form of weird cryonic rebirth over never waking up at all. Given that our general preference to not die has nothing fundamental about it, but is rather a case of us following our evolutionary leanings, what makes it so obvious that cryonic rebirth is a good thing. Some form of longetivity research which extends our life to say 200 years without going the cryonic route with all the above risks especially for the first few generations of cryonic guinea pigs, seems much harder to argue against.
Unfortunately all the discussion on this forum including the writings by Eliezer seem to draw absolutely no distinction between the two scenarios:
A. Signing up for cryonics now, with all the associated risks/benefits that I just discussed.
B. Some form of payment for some experimental longetivity research that you need to make upfront when you are 30. If the research succeeds and is tested safe, you can use the drugs for free and live to be 200. If not, you live your regular lifespan and merely forfeit the money that you paid to sponsor the research.
I can readily see myself choosing (B) if the rates were affordable and if the probability of success seemed reasonable to justify that rate. I find it astounding that repeated shallow arguments are made on this blog which address scenario (A) as though it were identical to scenario (B).
Nope, ongoing disagreement with Robin. http://lesswrong.com/lw/ws/for_the_people_who_are_still_alive/
If you were hit by a car tomorrow, would you be lying there thinking, 'well, I've had a good life, and being dead's not so bad, so I'll call the funeral service' or would you be calling an ambulance?
Ambulances are expensive, and doctors are not guaranteed to be able to fix you, and there is chance you might be in for some suffering, and you may be out of society for a while until you recover - but you call them anyway. You do this because you know that being alive is better than being dead.
Cryonics is just taking this one step further., and booking your ambulance ahead of time.
I think it's a mistake to put all the opinions you agree with in a special category. Why do some people come quickly to beliefs you agree with? There is no reason, except that sometimes people come quickly to beliefs, and some beliefs happen to match yours.
People who share one belief with you are more likely to share others, so you're anecdotally finding people who agree with you about non-cryonics things at a cryonics conference. Young people might be more likely to change their mind quickly because they're more likely to hear something for the first time.
True. In this case, once you get the consequentialist/utilitarian "click", you're more likely to come down with the rest of the clicks - the examples he listed are highly entangled.
More strongly, is there any reason to believe that people are more likely to "click" to rational beliefs than irrational ones?
As an example, papal infallibility once clicked for me (during childhood religious education), which I think most people here would agree is wrong, even conditioned on the existence of God.
Hah, "Magic Click" --I see that all the time, people who don't know cryonics is real-or have not met anyone actually signed up. Left and right, every day kids and adults think it is a "cool" idea, they express interest--but they don't go through the steps to become a signed cryonicist. I'm not sure what causes one person to go through all the paperwork and another just thinks they might want to do that some day--from what I've seen, people who sign up for cryonics have had a brush with death and seem more motivated--it could come down to a person's personality and their level of planning things in life too. Thank you for your comment bshock. Some religions could take the stance that you must be signed up for cryonics, because if it works then it is your purpose to do more good for your faith. I could imagine how frustrating it would be to work at Alcor, the paperwork truly needs to be simplified-but cryonics is not yet large enough to be safely accepted, they have to cover every angle possible that could come up. CI is a lot easier to sign up with paperwork, but they don't have a higher success rate--I think that you are right-at first cryonics is fun because it seems like a way to escape death possibly, then finalizing it is acknowledging that you will die.
<i>if you wake up in the Future, it's probably going to be a nicer place to live than the Present.</i>
How do we know this? How can we possibly think it's possible to know this? I can think of at least three scenarios that seem much more likely than this sunny view that things will just keep progressing while you're dead and when you wake up you'll slip right into a nicer society:
1) We run out of cheap energy and hence cheap food; tensions rise; most of the world turns into what Haiti looks like now.
2) Somebody sets off a nuclear weapon, leading to worldwide retaliation.
3) Humans do keep progressing . . . and evolving, and when you wake up, you'll be in the same position as an ape in today's society. Society is indeed nicer today for us than if we were apes, but it's not necessarily nicer for the actual ape.
It seems unlikely that people would be revived in those scenarios, especially in 1 and 2. As for 3, biological evolution takes a long long time, and even then it's likely the future humans would provide a decent environment for us if they revive us. Unlike apes, we and future humans will both be capable to communicate and engage in abstract thought, so I don't think that analogy works.
Evolution by natural selection is indeed too slow to be a problem, but self-modification via technological means could mean rapid change for humanity.
It might still not be a problem since it's doubtful that a smarter civilization would totally lose the capability to communicate with humans v1.0 (knowing they have a bunch of frozen people around, they'd at least keep a file somewhere about the 21st century, or scan a bunch of brains to learn what they need to know).
And if they could improve themselves, there's a good chance that they'll also be able to improve the revived people so that they can fit in the new society, or at least accomodate comfortably humans 1.0 who don't want to be modified (who knows how a smarter than human friendly intelligence with highly advanced technology would deal with that problem? All we can guess is that the solution would probably be pretty effective).
I propose the term "clack" to denote the opposite of "click" -- that is, resisting an obviously correct conclusion.
That's more polite that most of the terms I tend to use.
-- Nikolai Strakhov, 1870s
Careful, man. If you bang too hard on this drum, people are going to start thinking "hey, why slog through the boring pre-FAI era? I'll just sign up for cryo, head over to the preservation facility, and down a bottle of Nembutal. Before long I'll be relaxing on a beach with super-intelligent robot sex dolls bringing me martinis!"
Suicides automatically get autopsied, so not currently an option.
Otherwise... well, it seems fairly obvious to an expected utility maximizer who believes in the von Neumann/Morgenstern axiom of Continuity, that if being cryonically suspended is better than death, and there exists a spectrum of lives so horrible as to not be worth living, then there must exist some intermediate point of a life exactly horrible enough that it is not worth committing suicide but is worth deliberately suspending yourself if you have the option.
This seems quite unfair to sufferers of mental illness. What if a person signed up for cryonics later becomes depressed, resulting in suicide? (It could happen.)
I guess I shouldn't be surprised at the near-total absence of cryonics-friendly law, but it's still worth remarking upon.
Several states allow religious objections to autopsy. The coroner can override it in some cases (infectious disease that endangers the public, murder suspected), but it's better than nothing. The state doesn't care what religion you are, just that you've signed a form stating you object to an autopsy.
ETA: The override process is pretty involved in California. It involves petitioning the superior court to get an order to autopsy.
I was assuming from what Eliezer said that suicides were also in the "override" category. If not, that's good news.
For that matter, what if a person is depressed (or terminally ill) and wants to commit suicide, but wants to sign up for cryonics too? That's actually my situation, and I e-mailed Alcor about it, but have received no response, to my chagrin.
Another consideration is that legal physician assisted suicide (I believe it's still legal in Oregon) probably makes autopsy less likely. I'll research this a bit and get back.
Also, I totally do not understand the second para of Eliezer's comment. Also, it seems like the obvious reason that people would not commit suicide just to get suspended sooner is that most people's life has utility greater than (future utility if revived)*(probability of getting revived). OTOH, if you're dying of cancer, get yourself up to Oregon.
It is pretty obvious that Alcor must avoid even the slightest suspicion of helping (or even encouraging) you to commit suicide.
This would be an extremely slippery slope that they really have to avoid in order to prevent exposing themselves to a lot of unjustified attacks.
Well, yes, I assumed that was the motivation. On the other hand, Thomas Donaldson. <strike>They actually went to court with him against California to support his "suicide".</strike> (They ended up losing. The court said it was a matter for the legislature.) And what I'm asking only amounts to figuring out the best way to avoid autopsy.
EDIT: Actually, Alcor probably wasn't involved directly in the case. I forget where I read that they were; I probably didn't read it. But anyway, the overall publicity from the case was positive for Alcor.
Cryonics does not prevent you from dying. Humans are afraid of dying. Cryonics does not address the problem (fear of death). It instead offers a possible second life.
I'm afraid of dying, because I know that when I am dying I will be very afraid. So I'm afraid of being afraid. Cryonics would offer very little to me right now in terms of alleviating this fear. Sure it might work; but I won't know that it will while I'm dying, and so my fear while dying will not be mitigated.
You might say hey wait jhuff- isn't actually being dead, and not have a chance at a second life a problem (or at least a missed opportunity)? Well I don't see how it is once I'm dead. Heck the expression "I'm dead" doesn't even make sense - there is no consciousness or awareness of being dead - if I really wanted to be a pedant I'd argue there is no ego that is dead; only egos that have died.
So anyway until I have died the overwhelming problem with death is my fear of it. After I have died, I don't exist. So certainly no problems there for me (I can't have problems if I don't exist). Cryonics doesn't seem to offer me much utility value.
For me, the overwhelming problem with death is that I don't get to exist anymore.
If you're going to be afraid of dying whether or not you've signed up for cryonics, then your decision not to sign up cannot depend on your anticipation of being afraid, as that is invariant across the two scenarios.
I don't really understand that statement. Your problem - here and now - is that after you die you don't exist anymore?
I can't tell you what your problems or fears are but is it possible the real problem here and now is that you are afraid of not existing after your death?
edit to follow-up this remark:
So then Cryonics is just a solution looking for a problem. I don't have a problem it can solve.
I value my continued existence; I'm surprised that this is at all confusing.
Is penicillin also a solution looking for a problem? How about looking both ways before you cross the street? Do you really place no value on the longer life you would have the possibility of living if you signed up? If so, why does the same consideration not also extend to the common death-preventing steps (ETA: limit that to sudden death, the kind where you experience no opportunity to feel fear) you presumably currently take?
Of course not, penicillin prevents death. So does watching both ways before I cross the street. Cryonics does not prevent death.
Well, I could try and calculate the utility based on my guess at the odds of it working, but I estimate that the utility of the time invested in doing that would exceed the marginal utility I'd find when finished. So I'm not going to look into it, for the same reason that I don't read all the email messages I get from potential business partners in Nigeria. Surely there must be a chance that one of those is real, but I consider that chance to be so vanishingly small that its -EV for me to read the emails.
Fair enough; I can't deny that your conclusion follows from the premise "Cryonics has so small a probability of succeeding that it doesn't even justify looking into the topic." I will note that this is a shift from "Cryonics is a solution in search of a problem" to "Cryonics is not a solution."
ETA: No, I take that last remark back. But my original comment about your true objection being about something other than your fear of death was correct.
Really my original point was and still is that cryonics doesn't prevent dying or death. My particular problem with death is a fear of dying. I truly have gotten over the fact that one day I will not exist. So I guess I was projecting this onto others, and probably that isn't valid.
Yes there is another question, which I didn't originally speak to, about the analysis of the marginal utility value of a possibly pro-longed life, but that isn't really something that interests me.
Even if we became much more confident in cryonics, such as some major technological breakthroughs - I would update based on the fact that knowing cryonics is likely to work would be a comfort to me as I was dying. So I'd go sign up, but not just because I want the pro-longed life but because I'd now view dying more like "going to sleep" and the fear of it would be significantly reduced. So even if I were never revived, I would have gotten value from cryonics if I considered it viable at the time I was dying.
Okay, fair enough. But asserting that cryonics won't work without detailed prior knowledge of its infeasibility and without even being willing to investigate it puts you in a terrible epistemic position. You still haven't argued for your ostensible point.
(I wrote another reply, but then deleted it as it was premised on a falsehood.)
I don't know why you'd assume I've done no research on it or have no knowledge of its feasibility. What I'm unwilling at this point to do, is try and estimate the marginal utility of the proposition in any serious or sophisticated way.
And I don't know where I said it won't work. That would be ridiculous to say that. Given our continued existence and advancement as a civilization it almost certainly it will work someday for someone.
We present we have substantial technical challenges related to preserving people in a state such that they can be revived. I also know there is debate on what may be possible in the even further future in terms of repairing brain cells that were destroyed through apoptosis or necrosis.
I also know there are a number of risks or barriers to revivals even after the technology challenges are resolved, and these risks (particularly the economic and political risks) increase the longer it takes the revival and medical technology to catch up. No one can predict the odds that any given person now would ever be revived, but there are many reasons to be pessimistic about those chances.
It's because we're using certain words in different ways, and according to my usage of them, what you said somewhat weakly implied that you hadn't.
You did say "Cryonics does not prevent you from dying." If cryonics works, then I don't consider the life events that follow resuscitation to be a second life that occured after death, as opposed to a single life with a long inanimate period somewhere in the middle -- to me, that just looks like a distinction without a difference. This is an example of the ongoing semantic clash.
Anyway, it now seems to me that you've practiced some form of Dark Side Epistemology on yourself, in that the fact that after you're dead you have no preferences seems to be critical to your reasoning. I'm all for removing time inconsistency of preferences, but I think that's going a bit far.
It seems that CronoDAS had a far better grasp than me of what you were actually claiming; the linked query is far more apposite than I originally appreciated, and I'd be very interested in your reply to his question. I'll even accentuate it: does the fact that if you were in a stable coma* you would have no preferences excuse your doctor from rescuing you from that coma if they can?
* Let us stipulate that you have no awareness of your state.
My ostensible point again: cryonics doesn't prevent dying. I really need to present an argument for this?
Or I need to present an argument for my point that I'm only afraid of dying, and not of being dead?
Well here it is: I can die. I can't be dead - because at that point there is no I. So while right now I can fear the void, it won't be a problem once I am dead. Note that insertion of cryonics does not change any of these facts. I'll still be afraid of dying, I'll still die, I will no longer exist. Whether I'm in a frozen can or my ashes are scattered in the ocean there will be an identical amount of neural computation. So I won't exist and I won't have any problems, either way.
Yes. I think the standard counterargument is linked to on the wiki; 'death' is a moving target, and it seems like "information-theoretic death" is a good candidate for what "death" will mean when the technology settles out.
(Original poster thinks of himself as a persistent billiard ball of identity, when neural processing stops, the billiard ball winks out of existence. This winking-out is death. If anyone wants to explain the ontological falsity of the billiard-balls theory to the original poster at less length than working all the way up to here, they can go ahead and try.)
I'm pretty sure your terminology is causing a lot of needless confusion here. I think people are reading "cryonics doesn't prevent dying" as "cryonics does not prevent death", which is the usual way of speaking. If someone says, "Sam's dying; do something!" they don't so much want you to stop Sam from feeling like he's dying, but rather they want you to make it so that Sam does not die.
However, you seem to be talking about death in the following, and people's replies might be better directed towards this:
Funny that your expected value from posting this comment was higher than researching cryonics.
Funny, I had the same thought. But I actually I got value from the responses I've gotten in this thread, even if you haven't.
Fear of not existing after death is not just some silly uncomfortable emotion to be calmed. Rather it reveals a disconnect between one's preference and expectations about the actual state of reality.
The real problem is not existing after death. Fear is a way of representing that.
I never said it was silly, I hope it didn't come across that way. And I am not at all suggesting that we shouldn't prefer life, and shouldn't take all reasonable steps to continue living as long as living is worthwhile.
Thought:
Is there a significant difference between the process of being suspended and revived, and the process of going to sleep and waking up?
When I go to sleep I expect to wake up.
When I die, even if I had a cryogenic stand-by all ready to go, I would not expect to be revived. So dying would be a lot more emotionally painful than going to sleep.
In the future, if cryonic suspension and revival is an ordinary fact of life (for space travel or whatever) then I think there would be not much difference. The main emotional difference would be that you know you are going to be "away" for a long time. You may know people will miss you etc. Just like if you were taking a long trip with no communications.
So different from sleep/wake but not different from other ordinary human experiences.
I think that this post should be linked prominently here for those who haven't been around on LW/OB for long and who might not follow all the back-links:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/wq/you_only_live_twice/
Oooh, but people can be wrong in so many ways. It's not a single extra crazy circuit. We've got redundancies: in most people, perhaps the 'main' circuits are never quite laid down right, but the redundant parts take over. This is so common people don't agree what the main circuits are; in Japan, dyslexia is more common than, err, what is neurotypical in USA.
Some people over think it, some under think it. Under think it, and you think, "Bah, Walt Disney is wacky to freeze his head!" and never get past that. Overthink it and you may never actually sign up because you leech out all the emotional impetus (this thought process is more adaptive for getting rid of bad memories).
What? Are you saying most people in Japan are dyslexic?