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Rain comments on A survey of anti-cryonics writing - Less Wrong
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Is it such an outlandish scenario that given adequate and safe technology cryonics patients will be revived because of humanitarian and moral concerns? I see no reason why we'd switch to a burden-asset evaluation scheme of human beings when we have moved beyond that a long time ago (or more likely we never really adhered purely to it). As of now, there are rather few slaves around and we mostly refrain from killing retarded infants.
Human trafficking is a massive problem that goes mostly unreported in the media.
800,000 out of 7 billion people? That doesn't sound like very much at all.
Please provide a list of things you consider more damaging as far as number of people directly affected per year.
Wait, I'm sorry, was this supposed to be a complete list?
It was supposed to be a convincing list which definitively shows that 800,000 people being tortured and raped by other human beings is not very much, as you claimed.
Yes, aging is bad, good for that insight. I remain convinced that human trafficking is as bad as I perceive it to be; it's right up there with war-in-general and certain epidemic diseases.
Would you change your opinion if it turned out that the figures for the number of victims are grossly exaggerated?
Would you update on new evidence? Are you a bayessian? Do you read LessWrong?
The 600,000 to 800,000 figure is cited from a 2005 report; mattnewport's articles are from 2007.
I was attempting to agree with him in the same snarky format he was using. I could have just said, "Yes."
Before mattnewport's comment, was there any fact or important value being disputed here, or merely how much negative affect we should be feeling and expressing about that number?
I introduced a trivial fact (the number) which I felt was relevant to the comment as far as the definition of 'very few'. I am disputing a pointless definition, and honestly I don't care that much, but gwern's smug tone got me angry enough to reply to a months old discussion that hardly mattered in the first place.
It isn't. Wikipedia tells me that 100,000 people die of aging every day after decades of suffering. So unless each of that 800,000 - remembering that aging deaths are only going to go up and mattnewport's articles on that 800k being inflated, and that the rapes and tortures are not the average, but extremes, much like Uncle Tom was not the usual experience of Southern US slaves - suffers 45x more than each aging victim, aging is a much bigger problem than human trafficking.
Yes, it is a much bigger problem, and I already admitted that, and I champion that cause myself. I still think human trafficking fits somewhere above 'very few', and that for problems on the scope of aging there do not exist adjectives capable of expressing that weight of suffering. I'm also incapable of caring about one thing to the exclusion of all others.
To summarize: Defining "not very much" as "less than 100,000 per day" makes it a useless phrase.
I don't think it's useless. We should only care about the largest problems, especially when there's orders of magnitude between the largest problems and suggested-other-problems-we-should-care-about.
To steal an example from Eliezer: to divvy up your resources and mental effort among multiple causes, some of which are very small, is like seeing a spinning wheel which is 20% red and 80% blue, and thinking, 'I'll make the most money by betting 20% of the time on red and 80% of the time on blue!' Actually, one should just bet 100% of the time on blue, and win 80% of the time; the other strategy would win <80%.
To put it another way, what on earth makes you think the marginal value of your dollar or interest helps human trafficking more than aging?
Human trafficking is a durable institution driven by powerful interests and countless intersecting conditions of life, and arguably will persist as long as economic disparity means there are people who wish to move from 'poor' countries to 'rich' countries. Working against that is about as likely to help as the trillions poured down the drain of Africa.
Aging, on the other hand, is 'just' an engineering problem, which nothing prevents researchers from directly tackling, and it's not a vicious cycle of interests and desires, but a virtuous one - if you can help the first credible breakthrough be made, the free market may well do the rest (because everyone needs a cure for aging, it's the largest possible market).
Further, consider this from the point of view of a parent. It's OK for a 20-something young adult to decide to take this risk, but how can a parent take this risk for their child? I wouldn't have children if I didn't feel as though I had some control over whether they were well taken care of -- how could I send them to an unknown point in the future? Today, there are many people and organizations that exploit children. I'm supposed to glibly pretend that these problems will completely disappear just with future technology? That would be pretty irresponsible.
A lot of people make some argument along the lines of, 'if they revive us, it's because they value us." Yeah. And if they value children, without their mommies?
This just breaks my heart, because I can understand the fear. I wouldn't want to have children if I thought they'd be taken away from me. But if I already had them, I would want them alive first and foremost. Even if that meant they'd be taken away. Living far away > dying in my arms.
I can imagine my kids in bad situations, and in most of those situations I would want them to keep living. If I was dying during some kind of terrible revolution, I wouldn't kill my children to protect them from an unknown future. They're already alive, come what may.
Cryonics feels like a choice again, and for me this is a moral choice -- perhaps a deontological one. I am willing to hear a variety of moral solutions/arguments, I just think this is something that needs address.
I wrote in another comment,
By "cryonics feels like a choice again", do you mean it bears emotional similarity to choosing to have children in the first place, more than choosing to let them go on living, and therefore you wouldn't sign your children up to be revived under any circumstances you wouldn't have chosen to have them in the first place?
If so, I hope you will do everything you can to reverse that impression. Think of the frozen people as asleep, comatose, blinking, time-traveling - not dead. They will be revived not as infants, not as new people, not as ontologically unrelated snippets of personhood wearing secondhand names - they will wake up. If your children are frozen and revived, then afterwards, they will be alive. If your children are not frozen and revived, then absent really convenient timing, they will be dead.
This sounds reasonable to me, so I'm not sure why it doesn't feel conclusive. Maybe I'm just waiting for the revolutionary to contribute his necessary component.
Last night, I had a sad dream that my brother's little child passed away. (I guess my brain thought this was safe, because my brother doesn't have kids.) The dream just had one theme: the regret that I felt that when the child died, she was gone forever.
My dream was just an emotion and didn't address my waking concerns at all. It so happened in my dream that the child died in a way that was perfect for cryo-preservation, and there was an infrastructure for cryonics in the sense that everyone else in the family decided to sign up for cryonics just a little bit later. The extreme sadness was that they would continue in the future forever without the little one. The sadness of her being left behind was very painful.
Don't leave your children behind. You don't have the problem with them that I have with my sister. You have the power to sign them up. You don't have to let your imaginary niece's fate happen to your kids.
You seem to be thinking as if a person dies, and then cryonics is a way that can maybe bring them back to life. It is more accurate to say that a person loses the capacity to to sustain their own life (and experience it), and cryonics is a way to keep them alive until potential future technology can restore their ability to sustain and experience their life.
Can we please focus on one argument against cryonics at a time? Isn't this shifting to a new counterargument whenever an old one is addressed just logical rudeness?
If you don't dispute anything I actually say about technical feasibility, please take this discussion elsewhere.
EDIT: Downvotes are useful information, but comments explaining them are even better - thanks!
I didn't down vote you but I do feel frustrated about the censure. First, I obviously don't think technological feasibility is anywhere near the right question. So I should just ignore this post. (But) secondly, other people are discussing other issues -- this whole thread is all about whether or not we'll get revived and why; it has nothing to do with technology. If I don't respond to this thread because it's off-topic, then I'm just missing an opportunity to further an agenda that is very important to me. I like to follow rules but I'm not likely to follow them sacrificially while others disregard them.
An important subtext of the current extended discussion, which in one sense can be seen as fallout from the "Normal Cryonics" article, is how to conduct a debate in a manner that is both epistemically and instrumentally rational.
One major issue, raised by the "Logical rudeness" post, is that ordinary conversation has a nasty tendency to go in circles revolving around each interlocutor's pet anxiety or trigger issue. No one is exempt: I tend to focus on the financial and logistical aspects, and that says something about me.
Rather than think of ciphergoth's intervention as "censure", please think of it as the unpleasant but necessary work of a volunteer facilitator, doing his best to keep the conversation on track.
This conversation touches on an issue that is deeply important to you, that much I understand. Perhaps your interests are better served by your drafting a separate post to lay out this issue as clearly as you can, a post in which you'd set out to apply the thinking tools you've learned from LW or that you wish to introduce to LW?
Your first point I think you answer yourself, is that fair? Your second is a good one, but I wonder what the right thing to do about it is. I did reply to the top-level ancestor comment of this one to say "this is off-topic"; are you saying that where discussion blossoms anyway, that railing against in-thread commenters is a mistake? Certainly where top-level comments have started talking about other arguments, I think that is logical rudeness, and you don't seem to disagree; is there anything to be done about it beyond the comment on the top-level comment?
EDIT to make clear: questions are not rhetorical.
I would have preferred if everyone were conforming, because then my argument could have waited.
I think this just represents a real difference in our goals and objectives: you want focused and on-topic comments, and I want to respond to this thread.
Given the dichotomy in objectives, I think I should make the comment, and you should complain again and down-vote me.
Logistically, you should probably have made it more clear in the Less Wrong post that you were trying to enforce this norm; I didn't know about this until I read a comment you made far down in the thread that we needed to read and follow the rules in a paragraph at the end of your blog post.
I think we both think the other's objective is fair enough.
I probably should have made it clear, but I'd also like to encourage the norm that with or without such explicit per-post policies, where someone makes a post focussing on counterargument A, that commenting about counterargument B is recognised as logical rudeness. This doesn't help with the bind you find yourself in today, but might help in future.
Logical rudeness, as I read the article, was referring to switching arguments in the pattern A to B to A but only switching after A was essentially debunked. If byrnema never switches back to A it doesn't fit the pattern.
I could have misinterpreted the article.
Okay, I was misinterpreting.
As much as threads are better than anything else I have seen to track multiple participants in a conversation, I get the itch that there is a better way. Maybe I should go find one...
It would be nice if we could transplant threads to where they are appropriate, with just a link to and from the old location where they were inspired.
Let's move this here.
I didn't read that Ciphergoth was accusing me of logical rudeness -- he meant the whole thread. And I agree.
Yes. Thanks.
Rain, I'm aware of human trafficking and other abuses, which is the reason I said "rather few" instead of "no". But compared to just a few hundred years ago slaves are as rare as hen's teeth.
And yet population nowadays is so much larger than in ancient times so there are claims the absolute number of slaves is currently higher than ever before
The number given in that article is 27 million slaves. Yet Wikipedia claims that 55 million people lived in the Roman Empire in AD 300-400. Were less than half of them slaves? (And that's ignoring the slaves in the rest of the world at the time.) The same page claims that in 1750, the world population was almost 800 million. Were 29 out of 30 people at the time really free? Surely slavery was more widespread among the hierarchical city cultures that left written records than among the "barbarians", but it's hard to imagine that the number has always been less than 27 million. During the Middle Ages, throughout all of Europe, the vast majority of the people were serfs, bound to their land, living and dying at the mercy of their lords.
If it's true that 249 out of every 250 people today is free, that sounds like a huge improvement over almost all of human history.
Moral standards in general can improve irregardless of the number of people involved. Besides, one could argue that having more slaves is outweighed by having much more non-slaves living good lives. In regard to cryonics: all else being equal I'd favor to be reanimated in a world with low slave to non-slave ratios if I preferred the probability of my becoming a slave to be as low as possible.