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NancyLebovitz comments on A proposal for a cryogenic grave for cryonics - Less Wrong
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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.
I suspect the intended word was singleton
Which has less overloaded meaning.
That's the one. Edited.
Or a spelling error when referencing a somewhat credible authority. I didn't use 'overarching world government' because it would be clear but convey the wrong meaning.
Ah ok. This makes a lot of sense. Political singleton makes a lot of sense.
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.
Good question-- you obviously can't control the future of an institution, all you can do is improve the odds.
And this isn't something where I have actual knowledge, so anything I could say would be pulling it off the top of my head.
I don't think the "who'd care about the early adopters?" question is a real problem-- if you can get the thing going at all, it's going to have to have a lot of regard for promises and continuity.
They don't cut rocks anymore. Like, at all.
How would you feel if, a couple hundred years from now, there actually was a Cult of the Severed Head, with silly initiation rituals and charity fundraisers and a football team, but most of them just figured all this 'corpsicle' nonsense was really just symbolic, and spent most of their time arguing about which version of Robert's Rules of Order they should be using and how to lure people away from the Rotary Club?
Wiki says that the origin of freemasonry is uncertain. Do you have better sources? Was the purpose of freemasons to help them cut rock? Or was it just a group of people who shared something banding together to help each other? E.g. freemasonry was never about cutting rock to use a Hansonianism.
I'm not suggesting we copy freemasonry whole cloth. Simply that we need to look at what social organisations survive, at all.
Freemasonry was literally never about stone work. The stone work and ideas of architecture are used as an analogy for a system of morality, as I understand it.