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Nick_Tarleton comments on Open Thread: July 2010 - Less Wrong
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Communicating complex factual knowledge in an emotionally charged situation is hard, to say nothing of actually causing a change in deep moral responses. I don't think failure is strong evidence for the nonexistence of such information. (Especially since I think one of the most likely sorts of knowledge to have an effect is about the origin — evolutionary and cognitive — of the relevant responses, and trying to reach an understanding of that is really hard.)
You make a good point, but why is communicating complex factual knowledge in an emotionally charged situation hard? It must be that we're genetically programmed to block out other people's arguments when we're in an emotionally charged state. In other words, one explanation for why Robin has failed to change Peggy's mind is that Peggy doesn't want to know whatever facts or insights might change her mind on this matter. Would it be right for the FAI to ignored that "preference" and give Peggy's model the relevant facts or insights anyway?
ETA: This does suggest a practical advice: try to teach your wife and/or mom the relevant facts and insights before bringing up the topic of cryonics.
You are underestimating just how enormously Peggy would have to change her mind. Her life's work involves emotionally comforting people and their families through the final days of terminal illness. She has accepted her own mortality and the mortality of everyone else as one of the basic facts of life. As no one has been resurrected yet, death still remains a basic fact of life for those that don't accept the information theoretic definition of death.
To change Peggy's mind, Robin would not just have to convince her to accept his own cryonic suspension, but she would have to be convinced to change her life's work -- to no longer spend her working hours convincing people to accept death, but to convince them to accept death while simultaneously signing up for very expensive and very unproven crazy sounding technology.
Changing the mind of the average cryonics-opposed life partner should be a lot easier than changing Peggy's mind. Most cryonics-opposed life partners have not dedicated their lives to something diametrically opposed to cryonics.
Is this generalizable? Should I, too, threaten my loved ones with abandonment whenever they don't do what I think would be best?
I don't think this is about doing what you think best, it's about allowing you to do what you think best. And yes, you should definitely threaten abandonment in these cases, or at least you're definitely entitled to threatening and/or practicing abandonment in such cases.
Better yet, sign up while you're single, and present it Fait accompli. It won't get her signed up, but I'd be willing to be she won't try to make you drop your subscription.
Well the practical advice is being offered to LW, and I'd guess that most of the people here are not average IQ, and neither are their friends and family. I personally think it's a great idea to try and give someone the relevant factual background to understand why cryonics is desirable before bringing up the option. It probably wouldn't work, simply because almost all attempts to sell cryonics to anyone don't work, but it should at least decrease the probability of them reacting with a knee-jerk dismissal of the whole subject as absurd.
I mostly agree with you. I would even expand your point to say that if you want to convince anyone (who isn't a perfect Bayesian) to do anything, the probability of success will almost always be higher if you use primarily emotional manipulation rather than rational argument. But cryonics inspires such strong negative emotional reactions in people that I think it would be nearly impossible to combat those with emotional manipulation of the type you describe alone. I haven't heard of anyone choosing cryonics for themselves without having to make a rational effort to override their gut response against it, and that requires understanding the facts. Besides, I think the type of males who choose cryonics tend to have female partners of at least above-average intelligence, so that should make the explanatory process marginally less difficult.
I wonder how these women feel about being labeled "The Hostile Wife Phenomenon"?
Yes -- calling it "factual knowledge" suggests it's only about the sort of fact you could look up in the CIA World Factbook, as opposed to what we would normally call "insight".