"Why not buy cryonics for others?"
I think cryonics advocates should consider this, not as a rhetorical question about society, but as a strategy for themselves.
Consider the history of vaccination. Like cryonics (for the moment I assume that cryonics works, though I personally am not sure about that) vaccination was a new technology that helped people live longer but met with popular resistance. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, after almost dying from smallpox, had her son inoculated in the Turkish method and wrote many letters to her friends in England, promoting and explaining the practice, and had many of her relatives inoculated. That's the stage cryonics is in today. A few individuals -- generally open to the idea because they're particularly well-educated and often because they've been touched by tragedy -- try to promote the practice by getting it done to themselves and perhaps also to relatives.
After Edward Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine, though, the landscape changed. He got grants from Parliament to continue his work, and founded a charitable organization -- the Jennerian Institution -- to promote vaccination. In other words, he made it a public health issue. Vaccination was no longer something that a rich, eccentric lady might buy for herself, but something respected scientists under the auspices of the government would offer to all. I think that making vaccination charitable made it respectable.
It is hard to appeal to someone's idealism by asking him to buy himself a useful item. Cryonics, as yet, is solitary and individual, not communal and charitable. A few people, like Mary Montagu, for some reason really do want this life-extending procedure for themselves and their relatives. But if they ever want it to catch on more broadly, they should set up their institutions so that they're mostly giving it away rather than consuming it. The public will sympathize better with someone trying to save lives than with someone trying to save her own life.
But if they ever want it to catch on more broadly, they should set up their institutions so that they're mostly giving it away rather than consuming it. The public will sympathize better with someone trying to save lives than with someone trying to save her own life.
I support that. I posted (or was going to post? Can't remember if I did) a comment to that effect on one of Hanson's recent posts on cryonics, suggesting a charity offering cryonics to people with terminal illnesses, perhaps children especially. Something like the Make-A-Wish Foundation when...
Katja's recent post on cryonics elicited this comment from Steven Kaas,
"If cryonics is super-far and altruism is seen as more important in far mode, why isn’t buying cryonics for others seen as especially praiseworthy? Your list of ways in which cryo is far-mode seems too much of a coincidence unless cryo was somehow optimized for distance."
...a comment which finally caused the following hypothesis to click into sharp resolution for me.
My guess is that it's cryonics advocates who are optimized for distance. Most people are basically natives of near mode, using far mode only casually and occasionally for signaling, and never reasoning about its contents. Even those who reason about its contents usually do so and then ignore their reasoning, acting on near mode motivations and against their explicit beliefs. Children, however, actually need to use far mode to guide their actions because they lack the rich tacit knowledge that makes near mode functional.
Some people get stuck in a child-like behavioral pattern, probably due to a mix of neurological bugs which prevent near-mode from gelling (aspergers and schizotype) and internalization of explicit (far mode) rules condemning near-mode (obsessive compulsive personality disorder). They become Shaw's "unreasonable men" and push for the universal endorsement of far-mode ideas. Since other adults don't care about the contents of far mode much anyway except to avoid being condemned for saying the wrong things, others go along with this, and there's a long-term drift towards explicit societal endorsement of altruistic norms with an expanded circle. This does matter, in the long run, because such norms provide convenient nuclei for the emergence of forms of mostly-arbitrary identity markers.
Unreasonable men also develop artificial ways of reasoning, methods of rationality, which work even when the minds innate tendencies towards reason aren't engaged by near mode. These methods don't necessarily suffer from the bugs that near-mode reasoning suffers from. Once the right set of methods, most importantly math, science, nation-states, cosmopolitan liberalism (actions permitted by default rather than banned by default) and capitalism, are developed, they enable scientific and technological evolution to jump over low memetic fitness regions of the memetic fitness landscape and discover higher fitness technologies on the other side rather than leveling off at the 'golden age' level of Hellenistic Greece, Tang and Song China, the Roman late republic and empire, the Abbasid and other advanced Caliphates, Minoan Crete and probably many other pre-industrial civilizations.
Unfortunately, as civilizations reach a higher level of development, more effort is available for indoctrination, and the indoctrination methods are based on the introspection and intuitions of these 'unreasonable men', and are thus ineffective on normal people, who simply snap out of their indoctrination when they become adults. As the unreasonable men become further indoctrinated, they become less able to make effective use of near-mode reasoning, which their morality condemns, but the methods that make far-mode reasoning rational don't make it an adequate substitute for near-mode when dealing with situations where subtlety, competition or energy are required. Ultimately, the civilization systematically destroys the ability of its unreasonable men to compete for the slots in the society where rationality is required to maintain the society's energy and the society looses the ability to respond coherently to threats and collpases.
Cryonics is a canary in the coal mine. At a certain stage of collapse, there has to be some idea that is transparently correct when one uses valid reasoning to analyze it but which is roundly rejected by everyone with near mode and is only accessible to people in extreme far mode. Once the far mode people are too ineffective to promote their ideas to the status of even verbal endorsement by the general population this idea will never rise to prominence.
I'd love to see your thoughts.