ciphergoth comments on A survey of anti-cryonics writing - Less Wrong

75 Post author: ciphergoth 07 February 2010 11:26PM

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Comment author: RobinHanson 08 February 2010 08:27:19PM 9 points [-]

there is not one person who has ever taken the time to read and understand cryonics claims in any detail, still considers it pseudoscience, and has written a paper, article or even a blog post to rebut anything that cryonics advocates actually say.

This is an implicit appeal to an intuition about a missing dataset. So let me repeat my plea to make this dataset formal! Collect disputes from the past and dig for similar data on them - how many tech arguments by who in their favor, how many against, and so on. And especially - who was eventually right?

Comment author: ciphergoth 09 February 2010 10:37:28AM 3 points [-]

How could we do this? It seems to me that even if you were trying hard to avoid it, you'd have a very hard time not biasing your search in favour of examples that suited what you wanted to prove. Is there some external source of examples you could lean on that would unbias your survey, the way that people publish search terms in public databases when doing surveys of scientific consensus?

Comment author: RobinHanson 09 February 2010 01:41:15PM 2 points [-]

This is an issue with data collection on any interesting topic. It doesn't prevent such efforts from being useful. You choose a criteria and collect data that way, others who think your criteria off complain and choose a subset of your data to see if that makes a difference, or go collect more data according to criteria they prefer.

Comment author: ciphergoth 09 February 2010 01:48:36PM 5 points [-]

How would you start on a project like this? Serious, not rhetorical question.