This argument basically reduces to, once you remove the aura of philosophical sophistication, "we don't really know whether death is bad, so we should worry less about death".
No. It more accurately reduces to "we don't really know what the heck existence is, so we should worry even more about these fundamental questions and not presume their answers are inconsequential; taking precautions like signing up for cryonics may be a good idea, but we should not presume our philosophical conclusions will be correct upon reflection."
If you assume the median date for Singularity is 2050, Wolfram Alpha says I have a 13% chance of dying before then (cite: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+18yo+male), and I'm only eighteen.
Alright, but I would argue that a date of 2050 is pretty damn late. I'm very much in the 'singularity is near' crowd among SIAI folk, with 2050 as an upper bound. I suspect there are many who would also assign a date much sooner than 2050, but perhaps this was simply typical mind fallacy on my part. At any rate, your 13% is my 5%, probably not the biggest consideration in the scheme of things; but your implicit point is correct that people who are much older than us should give more pause before dismissing this very important conditional probability as irrelevant.
If you already donate more than 5% of your income or time to one of these organizations, I'll buy that. Otherwise (and this "otherwise" will apply to the vast majority of LW commenters), it's invalid. You can't say "alternative X would be better than Y, therefore we shouldn't do Y" if you're not actually doing X.
Maybe, but a major point of this post is that it is bad epistemic hygiene to use generalizations like 'the vast majority of LW commenters' in a rhetorical argument. You and I both know many people who donate much more than 5% of their income to these kinds of organizations.
Having a good epistemic atmosphere demands that there be some mechanism for letting people know if they are being irrational. You should be nice about it and not nasty, but if someone isn't signing up for cryonics for a stupid reason, maintaining a high intellectual standard requires that someone or something identify the reason as stupid.
But I'm talking specifically about assuming that any given argument against cryonics is stupid. Yes, correct people when they're wrong about something, and do so emphatically if need be, but do not assume because weak arguments against your idea are more common that there do not exist strong arguments that you should presume your audience does not possess.
This is true, but maintaining a good epistemic atmosphere and getting people to take what they see as a "fringe subject" seriously are two entirely separate and to some extent mutually exclusive goals.
If the atmosphere is primarily based on memetics and rhetoric, than yes; but if it is founded in rationality, then the two should go hand in hand. (At least, my intuitions say so, but I could just be plain idealistic about the power of group epistemic rationality here.)
If people are having kids who they can't afford (cryonics is extremely cheap; someone who can't afford cryonics is unlikely to be able to afford even a moderately comfortable life), it probably is, in fact, a stupid decision. Whether we should tell them that it's a stupid decision is a separate question, but it probably is.
It's not a separate question, it's the question I was addressing. You raised the separate question. :P
99% of the world's population is disagreeing with us because they are irrational in simple, obviously flawed ways! This is certainly not always the case, but I can't see a credible argument for why it wouldn't be the case a large percentage of the time.
What about 99% of Less Wrong readers? 99% of the people you're trying to reach with your rhetoric? What about the many people I know at SIAI that have perfectly reasonable arguments against signing up for cryonics and yet consistently contribute to or read Less Wrong? You're not actually addressing the world's population when you write a comment on Less Wrong. You're addressing a group with a reasonably high standard of thinking ability and rationality. You should not assume their possible objections are stupid! I think it should be the duty of the author not to generalize when making in-group out-group distinctions; not to paint things as black and white, and not to fall into (or let readers unnecessarily fall into) groupthink.
Written with much help from Nick Tarleton and Kaj Sotala, in response to various themes here, here, and throughout Less Wrong; but a casual mention here1 inspired me to finally write this post. (Note: The first, second, and third footnotes of this post are abnormally important.)
It seems to have become a trend on Less Wrong for people to include belief in the rationality of signing up for cryonics as an obviously correct position2 to take, much the same as thinking the theories of continental drift or anthropogenic global warming are almost certainly correct. I find this mildly disturbing on two counts. First, it really isn't all that obvious that signing up for cryonics is the best use of one's time and money. And second, regardless of whether cryonics turns out to have been the best choice all along, ostracizing those who do not find signing up for cryonics obvious is not at all helpful for people struggling to become more rational. Below I try to provide some decent arguments against signing up for cryonics — not with the aim of showing that signing up for cryonics is wrong, but simply to show that it is not obviously correct, and why it shouldn't be treated as such. (Please note that I am not arguing against the feasibility of cryopreservation!)
Signing up for cryonics is not obviously correct, and especially cannot obviously be expected to have been correct upon due reflection (even if it was the best decision given the uncertainty at the time):
Calling non-cryonauts irrational is not productive nor conducive to fostering a good epistemic atmosphere:
Debate over cryonics is only one of many opportunities for politics-like thinking to taint the epistemic waters of a rationalist community; it is a topic where it is easy to say 'we are right and you are wrong' where 'we' and 'you' are much too poorly defined to be used without disclaimers. If 'you' really means 'you people who don't understand reductionist thinking', or 'you people who haven't considered the impact of existential risk', then it is important to say so. If such an epistemic norm is not established I fear that the quality of discourse at Less Wrong will suffer for the lack of it.
One easily falls to the trap of thinking that disagreements with other people happen because the others are irrational in simple, obviously flawed ways. It's harder to avoid the fundamental attribution error and the typical mind fallacy, and admit that the others may have a non-insane reason for their disagreement.
1 I don't disagree with Roko's real point, that the prevailing attitude towards cryonics is decisive evidence that people are crazy and the world is mad. Given uncertainty about whether one's real values would endorse signing up for cryonics, it's not plausible that the staggering potential benefit would fail to recommend extremely careful reasoning about the subject, and investment of plenty of resources if such reasoning didn't come up with a confident no. Even if the decision not to sign up for cryonics were obviously correct upon even a moderate level of reflection, it would still constitute a serious failure of instrumental rationality to make that decision non-reflectively and independently of its correctness, as almost everyone does. I think that usually when someone brings up the obvious correctness of cryonics, they mostly just mean to make this observation, which is no less sound even if cryonics isn't obviously correct.
2 To those who would immediately respond that signing up for cryonics is obviously correct, either for you or for people generally, it seems you could mean two very different things: Do you believe that signing up for cryonics is the best course of action given your level of uncertainty? or, Do you believe that signing up for cryonics can obviously be expected to have been correct upon due reflection? (That is, would you expect a logically omniscient agent to sign up for cryonics in roughly your situation given your utility function?) One is a statement about your decision algorithm, another is a statement about your meta-level uncertainty. I am primarily (though not entirely) arguing against the epistemic correctness of making a strong statement such as the latter.
3 By raising this point as an objection to strong certainty in cryonics specifically, I am essentially bludgeoning a fly with a sledgehammer. With much generalization and effort this post could also have been written as 'Abnormal Everything'. Structural uncertainty is a potent force and the various effects it has on whether or not 'it all adds up to normality' would not fit in the margin of this post. However, Nick Tarleton and I have expressed interest in writing a pseudo-sequence on the subject. We're just not sure about how to format it, and it might or might not come to fruition. If so, this would be the first post in the 'sequence'.
4 Disclaimer and alert to potential bias: I'm an intern (not any sort of Fellow) at the Singularity Institute for (or 'against' or 'ambivalent about' if that is what, upon due reflection, is seen as the best stance) Artificial Intelligence.