SarahC comments on How best to show dying is bad - Less Wrong

14 Post author: Zvi 08 March 2011 03:18PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (70)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: [deleted] 08 March 2011 07:12:33PM 29 points [-]

Format of the conversation matters. What I saw was a friendly matching of wits, in which of course your father wants to win. If you seriously want to change his mind you may need to have a heart-to-heart -- more like "Dad, I'm worried about you. I want you to understand why I don't want to die, and I don't want you to die." That's a harder conversation to have, and it's a risk, so I'm not out-and-out recommending it; but I don't think it'll sink in that this is serious until he realizes that this is about protecting life.

The counter-arguments here are good, but they stay pretty much in the world of philosophy hypotheticals. In addition to laying it all out cleanly, you may want to say some things that change the framing: compare cryonics to vaccination, say, a lifesaving procedure that was very slow to catch on because it was once actually risky and people took frequent illnesses for granted. Or, cryonics is a bet on the future; it's sad that you would bet against it. If he hasn't seen "You only live twice" show him that. It's not misleading; it actually aids understanding.

The pizza thing you wrote is accurate but it's not how I would put it; it's a step in the direction of abstraction which makes it harder to actually change your mind. I'd use, as a simile, something like people dying of smallpox. I don't want people to die of smallpox, even though the universe doesn't give a damn whether humans live or die, even though there's some parallel universe where smallpox doesn't exist. We're here and we give a damn. We want less death, less destruction of human minds and identities.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 March 2011 08:00:32PM 6 points [-]

This and Mitchell Porter's are the main comments I've seen so far that seem to display a grasp of the real emotions involved, as opposed to arguing.

Comment author: Armok_GoB 10 March 2011 08:36:37PM 2 points [-]

yea, I hope I'm not the only one who feel stupid for just plunging into that failure mode.

Comment author: MartinB 10 March 2011 08:44:59PM 2 points [-]

What I saw was a friendly matching of wits, in which of course your father wants to win. If you seriously want to change his mind you may need to have a heart-to-heart

It took me at least two decades to realize that there are in deed these different modes of communication. At first glance it sounds so very stupid that this even happens.