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NancyLebovitz comments on A proposal for a cryogenic grave for cryonics - Less Wrong
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And in particular, where smashing cryonics facilities will infuriate the people who care about them, even if you don't believe cryonics will work.
I don't have a feeling for whether anti-cryonicism will ever get to that point. My feeling is that the sort of vandalism I'm talking about is extremely impulsive, and just not having cryonic storage near where people live is enough to greatly improve the odds that there won't be random vandalism.
Also guns. People with guns.
You probably mean security guards. Note that decent security is going to add something to the cost of cryonics.
However, this gets to the scarier possibility-- government policies opposed to cryonics. Any ideas about the odds of that happening?
Absolutely, and this conversation has prompted me to consider how best to handle such factors to ensure my head has the maximum chance of survival.
Now that is really scary. Also beyond my ability to create a reliable estimate. I wonder which country is the least likely to have such political problems? Like, the equivalent of the old style swiss banks but for heads.
It's hard to predict that far ahead, though Scandinavia is looking attractive-- the people there don't have a history of atrocious behavior, and there's cold climate available.
The nightmare scenario is a hostile world government, or similar effect of powerful governments-- think about the US exporting the war on drugs.
I hate saying this, but the only protective strategies I can see are aimed at general increase of power-- make money, develop political competence (this can be a community thing, it doesn't mean everyone has to get into politics) and learn how to be convincing to normal people.
While I don't expect future Vikings to raid cryonics facilities, I feel this statement should have been qualified somehow.
For what it's worth, the Vikings were very peaceable and property-respecting in Scandinavia - I'm sure we're all familiar with Saga-era Iceland's legal system, and the respect for property was substantial even in the culture (why was Burnt Njal's death so horrifying? because besides burning to death, it destroyed the farm). And even outside they weren't so bad; you can't raid a place too quickly if you raze it to the ground.
And the even bigger risk of such political singletons would be that they probably aren't too keen on allowing development of technological singleton needed to pull off the reanimation.
Agree again. Unfortunately most of the ways I can imagine to attain the necessary power take more financial resources and skills than developing an FAI.
Could you expand on what you mean by a political singularity?
And it's my impression that merely ordinary amounts of wealth can make a difference to politics if they're applied to changing minds.
In this context, exactly what you mean by 'hostile world government'. By 'singularity' I refer to anything that can be conceptualised as a single agent that has full control over its environment. For example, a world government would qualify assuming there were no independent colonies (or aliens) within realistic reach of our solar system.
Few entities with absolute power is likely to be inclined to relinquish that power to another entity. Don't tell big brother that you are going to make him irrelevant!
I find "political singularity" to be very unclear, and I'm curious about whether other LessWrongians came up with the intended meaning.
I was paraphrasing Bostrom from memory, and meant singleton. The relevant section is up to and including the first sentence of '2'.
I came up with the intended meaning but it required context. I think that overarching world government or the like would probably be more clear. This seems like an example of possible overuse of a "singularity" paradigm, or at least fondness for the term.
Why do you hate saying this, out of curiosity?
Because getting good at that sort of thing would mean getting past gigantic ugh fields at my end.
It might just be my own ugh field talking, but can you think of long-lived institutions that haven't had broad public support that continued their mission effectively over time. Even stuff like the catholic church has had periods where it wasn't really following its mission statement.
Or do you think you can get broad-scale public support? I'd rate that plausible in less theistic countries,
Cryonics doesn't need broad public support, it just needs to not be substantially attacked.
If we can get it filed under weird harmless hobby which has enough of a lobby that it's not worth fucking with, I think that would be probably be enough.
If violent rage against cryonics starts building, that's a hard problem. At the moment, I don't know what to do about that one, except for the usual political and propaganda efforts.
I don't know if it's possible to get many people to actually sign up for it unless the tech for revival looks at least imminent, so public support would have to be based in principle-- probably property rights and/or autonomy.
Long-lived institutions without broad public support? The only thing I can think of is Talmud study, and I don't know if that would count as an institution.
Okay we gain money and power now. What happens in 70-100 years when we aren't around to wield it. Will our descendants care upon our behalf? How do we create self-sustaining social systems?
I'm not interested much in Cryo for myself (although I wouldn't mind getting frozen for Science). But these kinds of questions matter for things like existential risk reduction that is time dependent. Like meteor deflection or FAI theory when the science of AI is getting close to human level (if it is a long hard slog, and can't be done before we figure out how intelligence works).
If we could get it to be a status symbol to be signed up for cryonics people will flock to it. You want to make it visible as well. Perhaps having your dewar as a coffee table or something.
Freemasons? Although it is hard to tell how well they keep to their mission statement they might be an example of a long-lived institution that does keep their mission.
This has happened at least once in British Columbia. See this article. As far as I am aware this is at present the only location which specifically singles out cryonics although there are other areas where the regulations for body disposal inadvertently prevent the use of cryonics.
This kind of stuff makes me boil with anger. Some bureacrat busybody inserts garbage about irradiation into a law at the last second, and there's nothing we can do to get it out? Is there some kind of international law against defamation? Because that is exactly what this is. And the stuff they prattle on about it taking advantage of patients in a vulnerable state is total nonsense. What they're doing -- pressuring patients into not cryopreserving -- is taking advantage, and in a particularly grotesque and unconscionable manner.
Ironically, if I were to send them a letter or call them about this stupid law they'd take it as me being a foreign busybody. This is stupid. They're the ones harming BC's global reputation by keeping such idiotic laws on the books.
/rant
Isparrish:
On the contrary -- as a general rule, in English-speaking countries, legislators enjoy immunity from any legal consequences of anything they say or write in the course of their work. This is known as "parliamentary privilege," and goes far beyond the free speech rights of ordinary citizens. In particular, they are free to commit libel without repercussions, as long as they speak in official capacity.
In the U.S., this is even written explicitly into the constitution ("for any speech or debate in either House, [the Senators and Representatives] shall not be questioned in any other place").
According to Mike Darwin one cryonics facility (don't remember which, sorry) has already been shot at from the street.
For being a cryonics facility? Is there enough evidence to determine if it could've been just a random drive-by?
I'm afraid all I know about it is a brief remark from Mike Darwin somewhere in this sequence of videos:
http://www.youtube.com/user/KoanPhilosopher#grid/user/B6A98520CF2F56AC