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On the unpopularity of cryonics: life sucks, but at least then you die
From Mike Darwn's Chronopause, an essay titled "Would You Like Another Plate of This?", discussing people's attitudes to life:
The most important, the most obvious and the most factual reason why cryonics is not more widely accepted is that it fails the “credibility sniff test” in that it makes many critical assumptions which may not be correct...In other words, cryonics is not proven. That is a plenty valid reason for rejecting any costly procedure; dying people do this kind of thing every day for medical procedures which are proven, but which have a very low rate of success and (or) a very high misery quotient. Some (few) people have survived metastatic head/neck cancer – the film critic Roger Ebert, is an example (Figure 1). However, the vast majority of patients who undergo radical neck surgery for cancer die anyway. For the kind and extent of cancer Ebert had, the long term survival rate (>5 years) is ~5% following radical neck dissection and ancillary therapy: usually radiation and chemotherapy. This is thus a proven procedure – it works – and yet the vast majority of patients refuse it.
Cryonics is not proven, and it is aesthetically disturbing (indeed even disgusting) to many people. It is also costly, and not just in terms of money alone. It is costly in countless other ways, ranging from the potential for marital discord, social alienation, ridicule, social isolation, disruption of family relationships (and with grief coping mechanisms) during the dying process, and on and on and on. And it does cost a lot of money, because if you figure the lost present value of capital for life insurance, dues, and end of life expenses related to cryonics, then that is a very significant dollar amount; my guess is that for a whole body patient who signs up at age 35 with Alcor, it is in the range of ~ $500,000 to $750,000 2010 dollars!
...Beyond this, many other factors come into play, such as perceived interference or lack of competitiveness with religion by cryonics, lack of endorsement by authority figures, such as physicians and scientists, actual marketing faux pas’s, such as the Chatsworth debacle and the use the words “death” and “dead” to describe cryonics patients. Then come factors which would, if cryonics were proven to work, be down in the noise, or more accurately, nonexistent, such as they way the current cryonics facilities look, the appearance and qualification of staff and so on.
...Over the past few days, with the passing of Robert Ettinger, cryonics has received a level of planet-wide media attention it has not received in decades. One interesting and valuable result of this is that various news venues have solicited public comment about cryonics, and what’s more, about immortalism, or radical life extension. As usual, cryonicists have been deaf to the criticism, expressed and implied in these remarks from the “marketplace. Or worse, they have been contemptuous, without being clever in their contempt and in their responses.
[quotes from comments & people]
What do these remarks mean? Well, they mean exactly what they say they mean in most cases. That may be hard to understand, especially if you look at the demographic data for how “happy” people are the world over. What you will find, if you do, is that people in Western Developed nation-states are extraordinarily happy. In fact, they are unbelievably happy (Figure 3).
Figure 4: Your life and future prospects can still be grim and relatively hopeless and yet your evaluation of your satisfaction with life vary dramatically depending upon whether you have a full belly, or even if you’ve had a meal in the past few hours.
How is this possible? The answer is that happiness is complex and exists on many different levels. The most important and the most difficult to measure is existential happiness. The issue of their existential happiness is something most people rarely, if ever confront, and almost never do so in public when asked (unless you ask them in the right way, such as, “Would you want to live forever?”). The reason for this is that if they respond by saying “My life is a boring exercise in getting from day-to-day with a lot of nagging miseries and frustrating inconveniences,” they would appear as failures, as whingers , and as losers. Few people find that acceptable!
...Figure 5: Humans were not evolved to be confined to a fixed space day-after-day and to do boring and repetitive work which is usually personally meaningless, and is done on the orders of others who are also omnipresent to supervise its execution. That is the working definition of hell for hunter-gatherers and they are uniformly both horrified and disgusted to to see “civilized” man behave in this way.
...Then there are the other people you must necessarily interact with. Several of the people you work with are complete monsters, in fact, they despise you and they go out of their way to make your job and your hours at work more difficult. And the customers! Most are OK, but some are horrible – encounters with them leave you shaking, and sometimes fearful for your job. Speaking of which, there is always some degree of apprehension present that you might lose your job; you might screw up, the economy may take a nosedive… In any event, your survival is critically dependent upon your job. Others whom you work with are better compensated, and those that own the enterprise you work for are getting rich from it, and that rankles. But, beyond these concerns, this isn’t what you really wanted to do with your life and your time. When you were fifteen, you wanted to _______________, to travel, to see the world, and to meet interesting people and do interesting things. Instead, here you are. And every day you are a little older and a little more run-down. The clock is ticking. When you looked in mirror this morning, you had to face it yet again; you aren’t young anymore and you aren’t going to get any younger.
...And frankly, why should you even try? You were raised with a very limited repertoire of interests, ambitions, and capabilities. It is so hard to survive in this world, even in this relative paradise of Western Technological Civilization, that mostly what you had to learn and spend your time thinking about were how to acquire the skills to compete and to make a living and support your offspring and your dying parents. All so that this cycle can be repeated, yet again (and to what end?). You laugh at people who talk about what makes the stars shine, how long the universe will last, where all the dark matter is, are there multiverses, what would it be like to “see” in the full electromagnetic spectrum, or even what it would be like to sit down and talk with Chinese workers or Egyptian shop keeps, and find out what they really think about Islam, democracy or the USA, without someone on the TV telling you what they think (and getting wrong)?
...The fundamental problems are these, in no special order:
- Most people lack autonomy in their daily lives. Next to life itself, freedom is the most precious value; and most people’s lives are functionally devoid of it. Many cryonicists fail to see this, because they are self employed, are in jobs that offer them compensating satisfaction, or that they don’t perceive as “work” (e.g., they are not watching the clock just waiting for the torture to be over for another day).
- Most people have a very limited range of interests and possibilities for gratification. This problem cannot be fixed for most by giving them more money, or even more money and autonomy. Do that, and they will drown themselves in what they already have, or kill themselves with drugs. How many cars, planes, and pairs of shoes or houses can you really gain joy from?
- The vast majority of people over 30 don’t feel well a significant fraction of the time. They have colds, flu, osteoarthritis, and most importantly, they are poorly conditioned as a result of jobs that enforce immobility and make them sedentary. As a result, they are tired and drained from their work and home responsibilities at the end of each day, and worst of all, they spend that part of the day when they feel the best and are most alert, doing what other people tell them to do – not what they want to do.
- They are losing their own youth and health and watching others suffer and die around them. How’s that for a satisfying life experience? Every day they turn on the news or talk to friends or family, and find that another fixture in their life is dead, or dying. As John Donne said, “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
...Thus, when it comes to happiness, people who are socially inept and who have trouble coping emotionally with the exigencies of life are, on average, the least happy. It should thus come as little surprise that our prisons are currently filled with a disproportionate number of people who are more intelligent than average and who lack the social coping skills to get on in society. They are also smart enough to know that many of the rules and orders given them are arbitrary and have no basis in reason beyond maintaining the status quo. As sociologist and educator Bill Allin has observed: “People with high intelligence, be they children or adults, still rank as social outsiders in most situations, including their skills to be good mates and parents.”[4]
The relevance of this to cryonics should be obvious to most cryonicists; cryonics attracts, with massive disproportionality, the highly intelligent. Indeed, many of the arguments that make cryonics credible, require a remarkable degree of both intelligence and scholarship. Inability to understand the enabling ideas and technologies usually means the inability to understand, let alone embrace, cryonics. A disproportionately unhappy population of smart people translates to a disproportionately large population of ideal market candidates for cryonics being unwilling and indeed, unable to embrace it.
...There is no one solution or easy fix. The first step is to realize that what the marketplace is telling us is true: many people don’t want to live because the existential ground state of their lives is a gray-state of dysphoria at best, and at worst, a state of active misery, relieved only occasionally by a few quickly snatched minutes of relief, or if they are lucky, joy. That state of affairs can only be addressed by showing people very real and concrete ways in which the quality of their lives can be improved, both here and now, and in the future. Heaven isn’t waking up from cryopreservation and having to go into work two weeks later – FOREVER. That is the very definition of hell for most people. And the mystics have been smart enough to carefully exclude any mention of time-cards from their hereafters. The Mormons and the Islamists have even had the good marketing sense to offer up eternities where each man commands his own world, or at the least, his own harem.
Conclusion, graphs, and references in article. As usual, I recommend reading Chronopause.com as Darwin has many good articles; to quickly link a few:
- ALCOR finances
- Master biomarker for health & aging
- Technological evitability
- The AIDS Underground (lessons for transhumanists)
- Harry Potter and Deathism
- Robert Ettinger obituary
- Damage in the aging brain
- Business & charity failure rates
- Factors in corporate longevity
- "Does Personal Identity Survive Cryopreservation?"
- Cryonics PR in Google N-gram
- "A Visit to Alcor"
- Soviet ICBM sites
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Comments (465)
This is an important issue, a form of slavery that persists in present times without attracting comparable attention and condemnation, but bad as an explanation for low popularity of cryonics, since a sizeable fraction of population doesn't have this problem.
Unless lack of existential happiness is considered as a factor in determining public perception of immortality and cryonics. Existentially happy people then make decisions based on that public perception.
Eliezer has said something wise on exactly this point...somewhere. It is somewhat in contention with what you say here, or at least how you say it.
If your foundational principle that you program into in AI is that slavery is bad, taxes become impossible to collect.
So arguing against something by saying that it is qualitatively slavery is suspect, akin to arguing against food because it is qualitatively cyanide. An argument against apples should have to enumerate the quantity of cyanide in the pits and the lethal dose to humans.
I'd rather say current work conditions have specific negative qualities, or if the best way to bring them to mind is with "slavery", then be careful to say it is bad because it is too much slavery, rather than bad because it is slavery.
Edit: it was Yvain who said it here
While I agree that the discussion could better be furthered by tabooing slavery, I think there is a much stronger analogy here than there is between, say, slavery and paying taxes.
For example, in theory, taxes constitute a high level social agreement to pursue certain goals which benefit all people, executed by an entity that fairly represents the collective interest. (obviously in practice this is a bit different.) In a perfect world, I envision myself willingly paying taxes to a law-enforcing singleton. This seems decidedly unlike "slavery."
However most people's day to day jobs are:
Slavery in the historic sense essentially had these characteristics, although in the sense of slavery in the historic USA it was often coupled with things like physical abuse and an intense loss of legal standing; and while desk jobs are harmful to one's health and the rich certainly have a different legal standing than the working poor I don't think that this makes for a good comparison.
Since when do people not choose their jobs or spend the vast majority of their time at work? Even the classic "nine-to-five grind" uses only a third of the day (discounting travel time), and none of the day on weekends.
168 hours a week, minus 56 hours sleeping, leaves us with 112 waking hours. If we spend 11.2 hours per workday dealing with work, lunch, and commutes (say, an hour commute each way, an hour lunch, and an 8 hour shift) then it's actually entirely possible for work to have managed to eat half our waking hours.
Even for a regular 30 minute commute and 30 minute lunch, you're still looking at 9.5 hours of work time vs 6.5 hours of personal time during your waking hours.
Work really does consume a huge fraction of our time and energy.
Good points here-- I hadn't considered commute, as I am blessed with a few solid jobs that let me work from home. This post definitely made me think about the whole conventional work schedule and how it can affect people's lives.
Rather than saying something from memory, I am going to go through my facebook friends list and tally all of the people that I know that are at jobs simply because they were the only job the person could find. I will also tally people who, due to overtime, strange shifts or stress from work, spend most of their waking time at work, preparing for work, or recovering from work. I will exclude persons that I do now know well enough to know all of this information about, and persons that I know to be on gap years or otherwise temporarily-unemployed-by-choice.
Of 75 persons whose employment status I was familiar with and was not temporary, 17 have jobs that they are in because it is the only job they can get. Five have jobs that, due to odd scheduling or stress, take up the majority of their waking hours. A further 49 I met in college, probably over 40 of these I met in graduate school. Because only about a third of developed world citizens have a college degree and less than 10% of US citizens have advanced degrees (I pulled these figures off wikipedia without looking into them too heavily).
So if I normalize my experience for demographics: ~40 graduate degrees, 2 people with jobs without a choice ~9 more I met at college; 4 people have jobs where they had no choice, 1 has a job which takes the majority of his waking time 25 which I did not meet in college (some do have degrees), among whom 11 have jobs which they did not choose and 4 have jobs which use the majority of their waking time.
-> general population: ~65% no college, 44% of these do not choose their jobs, and 16% take up the majority of their time (not with working hours but because of scheduling, etc.) 25% college population: 44% did not choose their jobs, 11% have their time hogged 10% graduate population: 5% did not choose jobs
This would leave me with 40% of the general population being in a job because it was the only job available to them, as well as ~13% of the population having a job that controls the majority of their time.
I will note that as someone with an opinion, my figures are probably slightly biased. Biases may come from things like remembering where people work only if they have complained about it, or forgetting recent changes in employment status. I would still expect that I have undervalued college degrees after adjusting for them, but I could be wrong.
These figures are definitely different from what I expected; I expected more than 40% to be in jobs with no real choice and I guess I'm pleasantly surprised that so many people are choosing what they do. 40% is still quite significant though.
I also grant that my statement about most people having jobs that take up the vast majority of their time was unfounded, though I believe it to be supported by such things as the introduction to "Living on 24 Hours a Day" and others' discussions of working lives in this thread.
Upvoted for several reasons:
excellent theory about cryonics, much more plausible than things like "people hate cryonics because they're biased against cold" that have previously appeared on here.
willingness to acknowledge serious issue. Work is terrible, and the lives of many working people, even people with "decent" jobs in developed countries, are barely tolerable. It is currently socially unacceptable to mention this. Anyone who breaks that silence has done a good deed.
spark discussion on whether this will continue into the future. I was reading a prediction from fifty years ago or so that by 2000, people would only work a few hours a day or a few days a week, because most work would be computerized/roboticized and technology would create amazing wealth. Most work has been computerized/roboticized, technology has created amazing wealth, but working conditions are little better, and maybe worse, than they were fifty years ago. A Hansonian-style far future could lead to more of the same, and Hanson even defends this to a degree. In my mind, this is something futurologists should worry about.
summary of the article was much better than the article itself, which was cluttered with lots of quotes and pictures and lengthiness. Summaries that are better than the original articles are hard to do, hence, upvote.
How confident are you that this reflects the experience of working people rather than how you would feel if you were in their position?
I've wondered about this a lot myself. Note along with figure 3 of the quoted article, according to a Gallup poll the average self reported life satisfaction in America is around 7/10. Presumably this average includes even including the sick/elderly/poor. I believe that my own self reported life satisfaction would be considerably lower than that if I were living the life of an average American.
I would guess that the difference is mostly accounted for by my own affective response to a given situation diverging heavily from the affective response that members of the general population would have in the same situation.
It's entirely possible for working life to be awful and people living those lives to genuinely self-report an average of 7/10 on a happiness scale. This is likely due to facts about how humans set their baseline happiness, how they respond to happiness surveys, and what social norms have been inculcated.
Like, when given a scale out of 10, people might anchor 5 as the average life, and for social signaling and status purposes, reasons for them being different-better are more available to their conscious mind than reasons for them being different-worse, so they add a few points.
There are also other problems with the average happiness level being above average - it suggests some constant is at work.
I just realized that a link to an article by Angus Deaton about a Gallup poll that I meant to include in the comment above didn't compile. I've since added it.
I agree. But I don't see the considerations that you bring up as decisive. Several points:
•According to Angus Deaton's article
If I were to give a response of 7/10 to this question it would indicate that my life is more good than it is bad. You're right that my interpretation may not be the one used by the typical subject. But I disagree with:
it could be that everyone finds their lives to be more good than bad or that everyone finds their lives more bad than good.
• You raise the hypothetical:
but one could similarly raise ad hoc hypotheticals that point in the opposite direction. For example, maybe people function best when they're feeling good and so they're wired to feel good most of the time but grass-is-greener syndrome leads them to subtract a few points.
• Note that suicide rates are low all over the world. A low suicide rate is some sort of indication that members of a given population find their lives to be worth living.
• Note that according to Deaton's article, life satisfaction scores by country vary from ~ 4 to ~ 7 in rough proportion to median income in a given country. This provides some indication that (a) life satisfaction scores pick up on a factor that transcends culture and that (b) Americans are distinctly more satisfied with their lives than sub-Saharan Africans are. But in line with my above point, sub-Saharan Africans seldom commit suicide. In juxtaposition with this, the data from Deaton's article suggests that the average American's life satisfaction is well above the point at which he or she would commit suicide.
Yeah, re-reading my post it's very handwave-y. However, a point you made about more good than bad / more bad than good stuck out to me. I wonder if a survey question "On a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 is every thing that happens to you is a bad thing, and 10 is every thing that happens to you is a good thing, what number would you give to your life?" would provide scores correlated with life satisfaction surveys. (Ideally we would simply track people and, every time a thing happened to them, ask them whether this thing was good or bad. Then we could collate the data and get a more accurate picture than self-reporting, but the gain doesn't outweigh the sheer impracticality so I'll be content with self-reported values).
I feel like if it correlated weakly, you would be right. And now that I think about the experiment, I'm fairly convinced it would come out correlated.
Suicide rates could be low even when the average experience of the general population is worse than unconsciousness. People may apply scope insensitivity and discount large quantities of non-severe future suffering for themselves. Happiness reports can lead to different results than an hour-to-hour analysis would. Asking for each hour, "Would you rather experience an exact repeat of last hour, or else experience nothing for one hour, all other things exactly equal? How much would you value that diffence?" might lead to very different results if you integrate the quantities and qualities.
People with lives slightly not worth living may refrain from suicide because they fear death, feel obligated toward their friends and family, or are infected with memes about reward or punishment in an imaginary afterlife. A very significant reason is probably that bearably painless and reliable suicide methods are not universally within easy reach (are they in sub-Sahara Africa?). In fact, there is a de facto suicide prohibition in place in most contries, with more or less success. The majority of suicide attempts fail.
So continued existence can be either involuntary or irrational, and suicide rates can be low even when life generally feels more bad than good. If all sentient entities could become rational decision-makers whose conscious existence is universally voluntary, that would probably be the most significant improvement of life on earth since it evolved.
I agree. See also this comment and subsequent discussion. I consider low suicide rates to be weak evidence that people find their lives worth living, not definitive evidence. There's other evidence, in particular if you ask random people if their lives are worth living they'll say yes much more often than not. Yes they may be signaling and/or deluded, but it seems hubristic to have high confidence in one's own assessment of their quality of lives over their stated assessment without strong evidence.
Somewhat confident. I work at a medical clinic. The number of people who come in with physical complaints relating to their job, psychological/stress complaints relating to their job, or complaints completely unrelated to their job but they talk to the doctor about how much they hate their job anyway because he's the only person who will listen - is pretty impressive.
But there's a clear selection bias here; maybe the 10% of people who are most unhappy with their jobs visit medical clinics 5x as much as anybody else.
In any case, thanks for the info.
Technological advances can't shorten the work hours because even in a society wealthy and technologically advanced enough that basic subsistence is available for free, people still struggle for zero-sum things, most notably land and status. Once a society is wealthy enough that basic subsistence is a non-issue, people probably won't work as much as they would in a Malthusian trap where constant toil is required just to avoid starvation, but they will still work a lot because they're locked in these zero-sum competitions.
What additionally complicates things is that habitable land is close to a zero-sum resource for all practical purposes, since to be useful, it must be near other people. Thus, however wealthy a society gets, for a typical person it always requires a whole lot of work to be able to afford decent lodging, and even though starvation is no longer a realistic danger for those less prudent and industrious in developed countries, homelessness remains so.
There is also the problem of the locked signaling equilibrium. Your work habits have a very strong signaling component, and refusing to work the usual expected hours strongly signals laziness, weirdness, and issues with authority, making you seem completely useless, or worse.
As for working conditions, in terms of safety, cleanliness, physical hardship, etc., typical working conditions in developed countries are clearly much better than fifty years ago. What arguably makes work nowadays worse is the present distribution of status and the increasing severity of the class system, which is a very complex issue tied to all sorts of social change that have occurred in the meantime. But this topic is probably too ideologically sensitive on multiple counts to discuss productively on a forum like LW.
Do you know of a forum where this could be discussed productively?
No, not really. Opportunities for good and insightful discussion open up from time to time in all kinds of places, and sometimes particular forums can have especially good streaks, but all of this is transient. I don't know any places that are particularly good these days.
Could this be solved by setting up a new forum and being sufficiently selective about whom to let in (e.g. only sufficiently high-quality and sufficiently non-ideological thinkers, as vetted by some local aristocracy based on comment history elsewhere), or is there some other limiting factor?
I would love there to be a place suitable for rational discussion of possibly outrageous political and otherwise ideologically charged ideas, even though I wouldn't want it to be LessWrong and I wouldn't want it to be directly associated with LessWrong.
Strongly agree. Mailing lists are easy but damn have I become addicted to nested comments and upvoting/downvoting (automatic moderation!).
I know what you mean. I follow along with the decision theory list but is almost painful being limited to email format!
(Yup. Can't downvote Stuart. Frustrating. And the impact of saying so aloud without anonymity is not quite what I want to enact.)
I'd love to have such a place too, and based on my off-line conversations with some people here, I think there are also others who would. So maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to set up a new forum or mailing list, perhaps even one without public visibility. I have no idea how well this would work in practice -- there are certainly many failure modes imaginable -- but it might be worth trying.
I agree that the zero-sum character of status makes it unlikely that technology will shorten work hours (barring modification of humans).
I don't see any reason why this should be true. Population levels in developed countries have leveled off and up to a point it's easy to increase the amount of habitable space through the construction of skyscrapers. It's not even clear to me that one needs to be industrious to avoid homelessness in contemporary America.
You're right, things are a bit more complicated than in my simplified account. Lodging can be obtained very cheaply, or even for free as a social service, in homeless shelters and public housing projects, but only in the form of densely packed space full of people of the very lowest status. This is indeed more than adequate for bare survival, but most people find the status hit and the associated troubles and discomforts unacceptably awful, to the point that they opt for either life in the street or working hard for better lodging. And to raise the quality of your lodging significantly above this level, you do need an amount that takes quite a bit of work to earn with the median wage.
This is in clear contrast with food and clothing, which were also precarious until relatively recent past, but are nowadays available in excellent quality for chump-change, as long as you don't go for conspicuous consumption. This is because advanced technology can crank out tons of food and clothing with meager resources and little labor, which can be shipped to great distances at negligible cost, and the population is presently far from the Malthusian limit, so there is no zero-sum competition involved (except of course when it comes to their purely status-related aspects). In contrast, habitable land isn't quite zero-sum, but it has a strong zero-sum aspect since it's difficult to live very far from the centers of population, and wherever the population is dense, there is going to be (more or less) zero-sum competition for the nearby land.
Another striking recent phenomenon that illustrates this situation is that increasing numbers of homeless people have laptops or cell phones. Again we see the same pattern: advanced technology can crank out these things until they're dirt-cheap, but acceptably good habitable land remains scarce no matter what.
Housing need not be as scarce as land, if regulatory permission for tall buildings and good transport networks exist. There is a lot of variation on this dimension already today. Automated mining, construction and cheap energy could make sizable individual apartments in tall buildings cheap, not to mention transport improvements like robocars.
I agree that the situation can be improved that way, though it's arguable how much it runs against the problem that packing people tightly together has the effect of increasing discomfort and severely lowering status. But even with optimistic assumptions, I think it's still the case that housing can never become non-scarce the way food and clothing could (and to a large degree already have). There is in principle no limit to how cheaply mass-produced stuff can be cranked out, Moore's law-style, but this clearly can't work anywhere as effectively for housing, even with very optimistic assumptions.
I basically agree, and don't mean to nitpick, but there's also in the long run virtual environments/augmented reality.
Another possibility that would reduce the effective cost of housing would be small scale distributed manufacturing (I'm thinking Drexler/Merkle nanotech here). That would mean that most goods would not need to travel, they would be "printed" locally. There are exceptions for goods which require uncommon atoms, which would still need transport. (To be a bit more explicit: I'm trying to weaken the "near other people" restriction. As is, a lot of what we exchange with other people is information, and we ship that around globally today. Goods are another major category, which I commented on above. Physical contact is a third category, but a lot of that is limited to family members in the same household anyway.)
One factor which hasn't been directly discussed, is that housing, while partially designed to protect us from weather, is also partially to protect us from other people. The former function can be reduced in cost by better or cheaper materials. The latter is to some extent a zero-sum game. (There is a whole range of interacting social issues involved. Some of the protection is from thieves, some from obnoxious neighbors, some from intruding authorities - and these groups differ greatly in their ability to bring greater resources to bear, and also differ in their interest in doing so.)
Demonstrably the cost of housing has not dropped as much as the cost of a byte of hard drive storage, but that is not necessarily only because space is zero-sum. A lot of technologies have failed to advance at anywhere near the rate of computer technology, in particular housing-related technologies - the cost of building a structure, the cost of lighting it, air conditioning it, etc. I think that science fiction authors in the past tended to imagine that housing-related technologies would change much more rapidly than they actually did.
Transportation has also, in recent years, not changed all that much. That's another one that science fiction writers were massively overoptimistic about. Transportation changes the value of proximity, and the changes that we did experience starting with steam powered vehicles probably did radically change the nature of what counts as proximity. I am, for example, an order of magnitude or so "closer" to the city center now than I would have been two hundred years ago, holding everything constant except for transportation.
Building construction and transportation are at a kind of plateau, at least compared with computers, possibly in part because they require a more or less fixed amount of energy in order to move stuff around. In order to transport a person you need enough power to move his body the required distance. In order to build a building, you need enough power to lift the materials into place. I had the misfortune of working next to a construction site and I recall that for weeks we could feel the thumping of the pile drivers.
There's no hard lower bound on the amount of energy needed to move something horizontally. Any expenditure in transportation is all friction, no work. Now, reducing friction turns out to be a harder engineering problem than making smaller transistors, but just saying "energy" doesn't explain why.
And the gravitational potential energy in 1 ton of stuff lifted by 1 storey would cost all of .001$ if bought from the grid in the form of electricity. So clearly the energy requirement of lifting construction materials into place is not the primary cost of construction either.
For many people's psychological welfare, I think these may be lesser concerns than mobility, autonomy, and freedom from monotony.
I don't think that typical jobs from 50 years ago were better in any of these regards. On the contrary, the well-paid blue collar manufacturing jobs that are associated with bygone better times in folk memory were quite bad by these measures. Just imagine working on an assembly line.
Focusing specifically on North America, where these trends appear to be the most pronounced, the key issue, in my opinion, is the distribution of status. Fifty years ago, it was possible for a person of average or even below-average abilities to have a job, lifestyle, and social status that was seen as nothing spectacular, but also respectable and nothing to scoff at. Nowadays, however, the class system has become far harsher and the distribution of status much more skewed. The better-off classes view those beneath them with frightful scorn and contempt, and the underclass has been dehumanized to a degree barely precedented in human history. Of course, these are not hereditary castes, and meritocracy and upward mobility are still very strong, but the point is that the great masses of people who are left behind in the status race are no longer looking towards a mundane but respectable existence, but towards the low status of despised losers.
Why and how the situation has developed in this direction is a complex question that touches on all sorts of ideologically charged issues. Also, some would perhaps disagree whether the trends really are as severe as I present them. But the general trend of the status distribution becoming more skewed seems to me pretty evident.
How do you measure this kind of thing? Do you have a citation?
No, it's a conclusion from common sense and observation, though I could find all kinds of easily cited corroboration. Unfortunately, as I said, a more detailed analysis of these trends and their components and causes would get us far into various controversial and politicized topics, which are probably best left alone here. I stated these opinions only because they seemed pertinent to the topic of the original post and the subsequent comments, i.e. the reasons for broad dissatisfaction with life in today's developed world, and their specific relation to the issues of work.
I too would be interested in sources for this assertion. It goes contrary to what I would say if I were asked to guess about classes of today compared to classes of fifty years ago.
edit: Oops, I should have refreshed page before commenting, as I now see Vladimir_M responded. Leaving comment for content about my state of mind on this issue.
There is no obviously appropriate way to measure this, even in theory.
What does one say about differences in solidarity between and church members, as it varies from Sunday to other days of the week, and from now to fifty years ago? Likewise for football fans in a city...What does one say about it as it varies from during the Olympics to during an election, within country, party, etc...During war? During strikes? And so on.
To make this claim one would have to establish a somewhat arbitrary "basket" of status markers and see how they varied (willingness to marry people from group X, willingness to trust random members of group X not to steal, willingness to make fun of people from group X for amusement, etc.) One would then have to integrate over time periods (war, etc.), and it's not obvious how to do that. It's also not obvious how to aggregate the statistics into a single measure expressible by a sentence like the above even if we have somehow established a score for how each individual thinks of and would think of each other individual. It's not obvious what constitutes members of a class, nor how much the classes are to be judged by their worst members as against, say, their average or typical or idealized member.
What I most disagree with the connotation of is "the distribution of status much more skewed". For status, each of us views others in certain ways, has representations of how we are viewed, has representations of how we view others, has representations of how others think they view us...status is not a thing for which the word "distributed" is at all apt.
It's hard to discuss these things without getting into all sorts of overly controversial topics, but I definitely disagree that there are no obviously appropriate ways to establish whether this, so to say, skew of the status distribution is increasing.
Admittedly, these are fuzzy observations where it's easy to fall prey to all kinds of biases, but there is still useful information all over the place. You can observe the level of contempt (either overt or more underhanded) that people express for those below their class, the amount of effort they invest just to make sure they're insulated from the lower classes, the fear and disgust of mere proximity to anyone below a certain class, the media portrayals of people doing jobs at various percentiles of the income distribution, the reduction and uniformization of the status criteria and the disappearance of various sources of status available to those scoring low in wealth, fame, and bureaucratic rank, and so on. Of course, my observations and interpretations of all these trends may well be biased and inaccurate, but it's certainly incorrect to claim that no conclusions could be drawn from them even in principle.
I agree that was probably a too hyperbolic statement. History certainly records much more extreme instances of domineering and oppression. However, "dehumanized" was not a very good choice of term for the exact attitudes I had in mind, which I think indeed have little historical precedent and, and which don't really correspond to the traditional patterns of exercising crude power by higher-status groups and individuals, being a rather peculiar aspect of the present situation. But yes, in any case, I agree I exaggerated with the rhetoric on that point.
I wouldn't claim that, my claim is that there can't be one formula specifying what you want to measure, so for reasonably similar societies like this one and that of fifty years ago, you can't draw conclusions like that. If one looks at all the equally (in)appropriate ways to measure what you're making claims about, the modern USA outperforms 18th century Russia in enough ways that we can draw conclusions. I'll elaborate a bit on your examples.
The observations are the least fuzzy part.
With something like this, you could perhaps quantify fear disgust of millions of people if in proximity to other people. You might find that in one society, 50% are extremely disgusted by the bottom 5%, and nonplussed by the others, and the top 10% of that is disgusted by the whole bottom 50%, while in another society, the top 20% is moderately disgusted by the bottom 80%, and the top 40% absolutely repulsed by the bottom 1%...etc.
What exactly, or even approximately, are your criteria, and how much do you think others on this site share them?
What our society has is an unprecedented tabooing of many overt scorning behaviors and thoughts. Perhaps you totally discount that? It has also tamed superstition enough that there is no system of ritual purity. People at least believe they believe in meritocracy. There is a rare disregard of bloodlines and heredity, compared to other times and places, including modern Japan.
What that brings to mind for me is the honest labor memes from the Puritans, and how so many were ready to identify with the common man, Joe the plumber, etc. One might say that this was primarily or only because he is white, and I think we all discount its value because of that to some extent, and if you idiosyncratically discount it more than others, you should be upfront about that by being more specific, and not make implicit claims that according to your readers' values, what you say is true.
Were I trying to call out a certain statement as being sexist, I might quote the statement and tell people that the statement is sexist. That's totally legitimate if I think that, would they reflect rationally and calmly, they would come to the same conclusion, according to their values. But if the reason I think that the statement is sexist is because it's written in English, which has a long history of being used by sexists, it would be totally illegitimate for me to simply say to normal human beings that the statement is sexist, because the reason I think it sexist is its mere expression in English.
If you believe that your claims resonate with normal conceptions of fairness upon reflection by people, it's fine for you to just make them. But this particular claim of yours is so, let's say counter-intuitive, that I suspect you have very idiosyncratic values in which the worth of a great many things is reduced to zero where other people would think it worth something, perhaps a great deal. If so, please clarify that when you say "The better-off classes view those beneath them with frightful scorn and contempt, and the underclass has been dehumanized to a degree barely precedented in human history," you just don't mean "contempt" and "dehumanized" the way your readers do.
I think there may be some "rosy retrospection" going on here.
It seems like we have some essential misunderstandings on these points:
The "status skew" I have in mind has nothing to do with the issues of fairness and meritocracy. In this discussion, I am not concerned about the way people obtain their status, only what its distribution looks like. (In fact, in my above comment, I already emphasized that the present society is indeed meritocratic to a very large degree, in contrast to the historical societies of prevailing hereditary privilege.)
What I'm interested in is the contrast between the sort of society where the great majority of people enjoy a moderate status and the elites a greater one, and the sort of society where those who fall outside an elite minority are consigned to the status of despised losers. This is a relevant distinction, insofar as it determines whether average people will feel like they live a modest but dignified and respectable life, or they'll feel like low-status losers, with the resulting unhappiness and all sorts of social pathology (the latter mostly resulting from the lack of status incentives to engage in orderly and productive life).
My thesis is simply that many Western countries, and especially the U.S., have been moving towards the greater skew of the status distribution, i.e. a situation where despite all the increase in absolute wealth, an increasingly large percentage of the population feel like their prospects in life offer them unsatisfactory low status, and the higher classes confirm this by their scornful attitudes. (Of course, all sorts of partial exceptions can be pointed out, but the general trend seems clear.)
In fact, one provocative but certainly not implausible hypothesis is that meritocracy may even be exacerbating this situation. Elites who believe themselves to be meritocratic rather than hereditary or just lucky may well be even more arrogant and contemptuous because of that, even if they're correct in this belief.
Well, I'm not that old, and I honestly can't complain at all about how I've been treated by the present system -- on the contrary. Of course, I allow for the possibility that I have formed a skewed perspective here, but the reasons for this would be more complex than just straightforward "rosy retrospection."
I agree that even a post-scarcity society would need some form of employment to determine status and so on. But that seems irrelevant to the current problem: one where even people who are not interested in status need to work long hours in unpleasant conditions just to pay for food, housing, and medical costs, and where ease of access to these goods hasn't kept pace with technological advantages.
And although I don't think it quite related, I am less pessimistic than you abou the ability of a post-scarcity society to deal with land and status issues. Land is less zero-sum than the finitude of the earth would suggest because most people are looking not for literal tracts of land but for a house in which to live, preferably spacious - building upward, or downward as the case may be, can alleviate this pressure. I'm also not convinced that being near other people is as big a problem as you make it out to be: a wealthier society would have better transportation, and cities have enough space to expand outward (giving people access to other humans on at least one side) almost indefinitely. There will always be arbitrarily determined "best" neighborhoods that people can compete to get into, but again, this is a totally different beast from people having to struggle to have any home at all.
I think a genuinely post-work society would have its own ways of producing status based on hobbyist communities, social interaction, and excellence at arts/scholarship/sports/hobbies; the old European nobility was able to handle its internal status disputes in this way, though I don't know how much fo that depended on them knowing in the back of their mind they were all superior to the peasantry anyway.
Agreed that the class system is an important and relevant issue here.
But that's not the case in the modern developed world. If you are really indifferent to status, you can easily get enough food, housing, and medical care to survive by sheer freeloading. This is true even in the U.S., let alone in more extensive welfare states.
Of course, completely forsaking status would mean all sorts of unpleasantness for a typical person, but this is only because we hate to admit how much our lives revolve around zero-sum status competitions after all.
Don't forget about the status obtained from having power over others. That's one part of the human nature that's always dangerous to ignore. (The old European nobility was certainly not indifferent to it, and not just towards the peasants.)
Also, there would always be losers in these post-work status games who could improve their status by engaging in some sort of paid work and saving up to trade for the coveted status markers. These tendencies would have to be forcibly suppressed to prevent a market economy with paid labor from reemerging. It's roughly analogous to the present sexual customs and prostitution. Men are supposed to find sexual partners by excelling in various informal, non-monetary status-bearing personal attributes, but things being zero-sum, many losers in this game find it an attractive option to earn money and pay for sex instead, whether through out-and-out prostitution or various less explicit arrangements.
I agree that we hate to admit how much of our lives revolves around zero-sum status competitions. Here human modification via genetic engineering, supplements, & advanced technologies provides a potential way out, right? That we don't like the fact that our lives revolve around zero-sum status competitions implies that there's motivation to self-modify in the direction of deriving fulfillment from other things.
Of course there's little historical precedent for technological self-modification and so such hypotheticals involve a necessary element of speculation, but it's not necessarily the case that things will remain as they always have been.
This is a very good point and one which I was thinking of bringing up in response to Yvain's comment but had difficulty articulating; thanks.
Trouble is, once you go down that road, the ultimate destination is wireheading. This raises all sorts of difficult questions, to which I have no particularly interesting answers.
Though I know others feel differently (sometimes vehemently), aside from instrumental considerations (near guaranteed longevity & the welfare of others) I personally don't mind being wireheaded.
My attitude is similar to the one that denisbider expresses here with some qualifications. In particular I don't see the number of beings as so important and his last paragraph strikes me as sort of creepy.
I don't know how you're using the word "easily", then. Do you classify all forms of social interaction as easy?
Well, "easy" is clearly a subjective judgment, and admittedly, I have no relevant personal experience. However, it is evident that large numbers of people do manage to survive from charity and the welfare state without any employment, and many of them don't seem to invest any special efforts or talents in this endeavor.
In any case, my original arguments hold even if we consider only rich countries with strong welfare states, in which it really is easy, in every reasonable sense of the term, to survive by freeloading. These certainly hold as examples of societies where no work is necessary to obtain food, housing, medical care, and even some discretionary income, and yet status concerns still motivate the overwhelming majority of people to work hard.
this seems very difficult if you aren't a member of a protected class. can a young white healthy male freeload easily?
I don't know about race, but I did read a piece by a young man who viewed homelessness as a sort of urban camping. He didn't use drugs and he didn't beg-- he found enough odd jobs.
I'm not sure this is true; I know little about welfare politics, but I was under the impression there was a major shift over the last ten years toward limiting the amount of welfare benefits available to people who are "abusing the system" by not looking for work.
One could probably remain alive for long periods just by begging and being homeless, but this raises the question of what, exactly, is a "life worth living", such that we could rest content that people were working because they enjoy status competitions and not because they can't get a life worth living without doing so.
This is probably way too subjective to have an answer, but one thing that "sounds right" to me is that the state of nature provides a baseline. Back during hunter-gatherer times we had food, companionship, freedom, et cetera without working too hard for them (the average hunter-gatherer only hunted-gathered a few hours a day). Civilization made that kind of lifestyle impossible by killing all the megafauna and paving over their old habitat, but my totally subjective meaningless too-late-at-night-to-think-straight opinion is that we can't say that people can opt-out of society and still have a "life worth living" unless they have it about as good as the hunter-gatherers they would be if society hadn't come around and taken away that option.
The average unemployed person in a developed country has a lot of things better than hunter-gatherers, but just the psychological factors are so much worse that it's no contest.
It turns out that homelessness, in and of itself, approximately quadruples one's mortality risk: study pointer:
The specific situation in the U.S. or any other individual country doesn't really matter for my point. Even if I'm wrong about how easy freeloading is in the U.S., it's enough that we can point to some countries whose welfare systems are (or even just were at some point) generous enough to enable easy freeloading.
Ironically, in my opinion, in places where there exists a large underclass living off the welfare state, it is precisely their reversal to the forager lifestyle that the mainstream society sees as rampant social pathology and terrible deprivation of the benefits of civilized life. I think you're committing the common error of idealizing the foragers. You imagine them as if you and a bunch of other highly intelligent and civilized people had the opportunity to live well with minimal work. In reality, however, the living examples of the forager lifestyle correctly strike us as frightfully chaotic, violent, and intellectually dead.
(Of course, it's easy to idealize foragers from remote corners of the world or the distant prehistory. One is likely to develop a much more accurate picture about those who live close enough that one has to beware not to cross their path.)
I like this framing (I almost never thought on this topic): money as status as measure of socially enforced right to win competitions for resources, but with a baseline of fairness, where you can still get stuff, but less than high-status individuals (organisations). Right-based bargaining power rather than a measure of usefulness.
Wah. Neat conceptualization, and much easier for me to wrap my head around than my previous non-models. Thanks!
This seems like a good place to point out the US centrism issue, as mentioned http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/6qr/lw_systemic_bias_us_centrism/ . Many countries do have safety nets that while not enough for actual comfort at the current tech level still makes plain survival a non-issue, and to some degree higher things through institutions like public libraries where you'll often be able to access the internet.
Land is only a problem because of the dept of education. Competition wouldn't be nearly so fierce if there wasn't a monopoly on good schooling. Look at a heat map of property values. They are sharply discontinuous around school district borders.
The prospect of an hansonain future does seem like a pretty good reason to delete all records of yourself, dispose of anyone with significant memories of you, and incinerate your brain in a large explosion enough to spread the ashes of your brain for miles around. At sea.
Hey now, the poor also smile!
It should make you happy with the present, though, if you use the past and the future as the baseline for comparison. As John Derbyshire once said in a different context, "We are living in a golden age. The past was pretty awful; the future will be far worse. Enjoy!"
Now I'm confused, how's other people being even worse of supposed to make me feel better?
Well, if we (the present humans) are indeed extraordinarily fortunate to live in a brief and exceptional non-Malthusian period -- what Hanson calls "the Dreamtime" -- then you should be happy to be so lucky that you get to enjoy it. Yes, you could have been even luckier to be born as some overlord who gets to be wealthy and comfortable even in a Malthusian world, but even as a commoner in a non-Malthusian era, you were dealt an exceptionally good hand.
No, I'm UN-lucky. I'd prefer a different, counterfactual universe where EVERYONE is happy at all times, and given any set universe I see no reason how which entity in it is me should matter.
A couple of comments:
Yes, a hansonian future looks appalling. Anything that gets us back into a Malthusian trap is a future that I would not want to experience.
I'm not sure that active measures to prevent oneself from being revived in such a future are necessary. If extreme population growth makes human life of little value in what are currently the developed nations, who would revive us? Cryonics has been likened to a four-dimensional ambulance ride to a future emergency room. If the emergency rooms of the 22nd century turn out to only accept the rich, cryonicists will never get revived in such a world anyway.
I find it bizarre that Robin Hanson himself both endorses cryonics and actively endorses population growth - both in the near term (conventional overpopulation of humans) and in the long term (explosive growth of competing uploads/ems).
@2: Most of it was humour, indicating excessive paranoia. Under that was basically a mix of being humble (might have reasons we would never think of to do it), and the implication that it's not only bad but so bad every little trace of probability must be pushed as close as possible to 0.
I've been wondering why no one has yet broached this issue on LW, that I recall.
Not wanting MORE years of this shit was my main reason for not wanting to sign up for cryonics. I may be shifting my view on that, slowly.
Anyone who bothered to wake you up would almost certainly do something such as be nice to you, callously use you as primary source grist for historical research, or torture you for amusement. Possibly, things would have changed so much that being nice to you wouldn't work (e.g., none of your friends are revived, your significant other was revived along with married partners of five or so permutations of physical sexual configurations and orientations, etc.
It's unlikely anyone would revive you to do the same ol', same ol'.
That actually sounds pretty accurate.
I actually end up having the opposite reaction. I LIKE my life. The life I'm living right now. If I die tomorrow, I will be upset in the moments leading up to it, not because I wanted to continue existing, but because I am emotionally entangled with the events occurring now.
What cryonics offers is not an extension of life in a way that I care about, but rather, knowledge of the future. I am very curious about the future, and have considered cryonics just so I could see how things turned out. But that curiosity is not infinite utility in the way most cryonics advocates consider immortality to be. And I'd rather use my life insurance policy to help bring about a good future than have a chance at seeing that future.
To me, the most relevant reason for not saving for cryonics mentioned here is that the success rate of cryonics is effectively zero at present. I am unconvinced that people being dissatisfied with their current lives is a significant reason for rejecting this procedure. Then again, it might take more evidence to convince me simply because even when I am dissatisfied with my current life, I still think life is far too short. I am more interested in methods of life extension that have more research behind them (alas, so little seems to be known at present). There are lots of unproven methods of life extension, so I'd greatly prefer to invest in something more proven. Perhaps in the future cryonics will have more of a scientific basis. Until then, I'd be more interested in donating to general life extension research than paying for cryonics specifically.
The success rate of not-cryonics is a guaranteed zero.
I'd go with cryonics.
Not quite so as brain plastination is not-cryonics.
Interesting. I'd never heard of this until you mentioned it and I googled a short description. I'll have to learn what this entails before I can comment more.
I have been working on a little essay about plastination, http://www.gwern.net/plastination - it's not very thorough, but Darwin says he'll send me what he's written before on the topic of plastination/chemical fixation, which ought to help a lot.
Thanks! Upvoted for the useful essay link. I have started reading the essay to get more familiar with this.
The point is that cryonics has a better chance of working than, say, placing a fried egg over your grave, and that's something people find very hard to grasp or work with.
I wouldn't disagree. I stated above that I find cryonics also more plausible than mummification as a life extension strategy, and I think I might place mummification as more plausible than placing a fried egg over someone's grave. After all, a significantly advanced civiization could perhaps extract enough information from a combination of the person's genetic material, remaining belongings, and statistical analysis that you could perhaps genetically engineer something close to their original body with it and then add memories sort of like what you think they might have had. I'm pretty sure the fried egg wouldn't be nearly as helpful. My main objection to cryonics is that I do not find it currently plausible enough to pursue given the fact that it is costly, other possibilities exist, and I do not have sufficient evidence of benefit.
On a completely unrelated note, could you tell me how you made that wonderful link of yours? I would be most appreciative if I, too, could have magical linking powers.
The point of the fried egg quote is to say that cryonics has a decent chance of working - it's the best bet given costs, not just all else equal.
The almost invisible "Help" link below the bottom right corner of the comment entry field explains how to get various magical powers such as linking and image insertion. The spell for magical linking powers is [text of link](link address).
Thanks for the very helpful commenting instructions! Magical markup powers unlocked! I have upvoted your very useful info on this.
As for pitting cryonics against a chthonic fried egg, I'm not sure that proves that cryonics has a decent chance of working, just that it is not completely implausible. I would be more interested in hearing more about what research has been done in this field, although I understand that is a time consuming task and I don't expect for you to do any research in that area for me (although of course no objections if you wish to).
I am curious why you think it is the best bet given the cost. For example, it probably makes sense as a strategy for someone who is a.) reasonably wealthy and b.) knows they are likely to die very soon, but that's because the opportunity cost will be greatly lower for such a person. Since they already have the money, they wouldn't have to sacrifice as much in their (certain) current life to try cryonics for an (uncertain) future life. Also, being about to die very soon makes the opportunity cost of giving up investigation of other options considerably lower.
Still, I don't think everyone has the same opportunity costs since not everyone lives the same life. I think learning a lot more about life extension is my best possible option, which should then be followed by investing accordingly. I think your comment reflects the feeling that cryonics has an image problem, and I would agree with that. I also don't think it should have as much of an image problem as it does, even though I currently don't have any reason to believe it will be overwhelmingly successful. I don't think there's anything wrong with trying whatever seems to be the best option given your own opportunity costs.
On probability it'll work:
I haven't done much detailed research. "Cryonics works" is the default given the history of medicine and what Alcor says; there could be a flaw or an outright lie in the case for cryonics that makes it deviate -I am not an expert. But the case against cryonics is non-existent. Why would experts not debunk it, if it were false?
On cost:
Robin Hanson has a calculation saying it's worth it . I haven't checked. Morendil argues that the cost (a few $100 per year) is very low relative to other expenses. Even if both arguments are false, cryonics still looks developed-country-cheap.
It's a bad strategy for someone who'll die soon, because they can't get life insurance. Cryonics is cheaper when young and healthy.
On opportunity cost:
Research time doesn't look all that limited. (If it does, why not sign up for cryonics with as little research as possible?) I'm not sure what other costs you're talking about.
Life extension is a very good idea, yes. But it's not incompatible with cryonics (unlike mummification and graveyard eggs); in fact it helps, because cryonics is best if you deanimate late (cryonics improves with time, and the longer your life expectancy the cheaper insurance gets).
If life extension techniques look so incredibly good that you put every cent and second in them, sure, go ahead and be a hero - but that applies to every expense, not just cryonics.
People who are young and healthy usually end up becoming people who are likely to die soon.
I'm guessing that's why it's a good strategy to get cryonics when you're young and healthy.
Many of the rates quoted are for term life insurance, which expires and becomes worthless after a certain number of years.
Thanks! Upvoted since your responses are highly relevant to my questions.
I'm first looking at the arguments for the science of cryonics that Alcor gives. I do not have much expectation that I can judge all their claims to be valid or invalid yet, but I will give my general impression of the 3 main premises they present on their site here:
1.) Life can be stopped and restarted if cell structure and chemistry are preserved sufficiently well.
Arguments for this are point are based on currently verified procedures such as reviving people after their heart stops, people being revived long after drowning in cold water, freezing embryos, etc. I assume this is the reason you say "cryonics works" based on the history of medicine. I would change this to say that the likeliehood of cryonics working is greater in the universe we live in, because we can now revive people that would once have been irretrievably dead, so it is not inconceivable that people could be revived in the future from some states that would be considered irretrievably dead today. I have no disagreement with this point. I would note that the 'some' in the previous sentence is important since it means that it likely matters what strategy is used.
2) Vitrification (not freezing) can preserve biological structure very well.
This is an interesting argument and not one that I was previously aware of, nor of the fact that kidneys have been usable after vitrification or that a cat brain briefly regained EEG capability after vitrification. I thought the pictures were very helpful in showing the structural improvements Alcor says have been accomplished in this procedure, and this increases my confidence that this procedure could preserve information. I will need to look into this determine in more detail what we know about this process. Alcor is pretty clear that the toxicity of the procedure prevents brains from being revived this way today, so I definitely want to try to understand that aspect a little more. It is good to know that the process has improved in preserving visual structure over time, however.
3) Methods for repairing structure at the molecular level can now be foreseen.
True, although I'm not sure if this is an argument so much for cryonics in particular as for finding the most successful strategy for preserving information about that structure in some way. Cryonics may or may not be the best way to accomplish this, and if the best way is mutually exclusive to this method, I think that would be an important piece of information in making the most rational decision.
I will need to look at the other articles some more in the future. I skimmed over them but have not yet had the time to think them over and formulate a response. Thanks for responding to my questions about the available research in the field, the costs, and the opportunity cost.
On preservation methods: gwern has an article on plastination. It's compatible with cryonics in theory, but not currently in practice.
I distrust "this improves chances of revival with method X"-type reasoning, though. The argument for revival is more like "A huge advance among the many possible ones, only a few of which we can currently foresee" than "Scan and upload". This encourages catch-all preservation methods rather than methods that optimize for a particular kind of revival.
How did you do that without spending any reagents?
You can escape the magic using backslashes. So to write [this], write "\[this\]".
I don't think the choice is as simple as choosing cryonics or ignoring life extension completely. I am very interested in the idea of life extension, but so far what civilization has achieved in those terms is relatively modest, given that the oldest person to ever live only lived to 122, and I probably can't hope to even get to that. I would be absolutely thrilled to be wrong about this.
What makes me hesitate about cryonics is that it is so speculative. Perhaps it is possible to reconstruct a living brain from a cryogenically frozen one. However, I would want to have some expectation that this was so. To give an example, the ancient Egyptians believed that mummification allowed one to continue to live. However, as they removed the brain entirely, their strategy for life extension is not one I think you would be interested in investing in (even if no one was saying you also had to believe in Horus,Isis, Osiris, et al). Cryonics seems a much more plausible revival strategy than ancient Egyptian mummification to me, but I also think restricted caloric diets are more plausible than cryonics (given that this has been shown to work on a wide variety of species, even if humans aren't one of those). You may think that restricted caloric diets could never possibly extend people's lives as much as cryonics, but I think it is currently impossible to estimate the additional lifespan of a person successfully revived from cryonic extension. Your assumption, I'm guessing, is that this number would likely be large due to improved future technology. Once again, I think this is a huge assumption, and given the large number of things I could conceivably try, I think the best bet would be to first figure out, to the greatest degree possible, the answer to the following three questions:
And I'm not saying that a person couldn't choose more than one strategy of life extension. For example, there's no reason that a person couldn't choose caloric restriction and cryonics. The only problem with choosing one or more of these (and other) strategies is that you don't just have the possible benefits, but the very real costs. And the more strategies you choose, the more of those costs you incur (even ignoring strategies that would be mutually incompatible). With caloric restriction, an obvious cost would be that it would take more time and effort or money to stick to the low calorie, high nutrient diet required (you probably won't find many restaurants or vending machines that serve the appropriate foods in the appropriate portions, so the only two choices would likely be to do all the cooking and meal planning yourself, or to have your own personal chef who is well-versed in such a diet). Also, if you do not have sufficient self-control, you would probably have to have someone hovering over you, forcing you to eat the right foods (significantly detracting from your quality of life and likely also a blow to your finances). For cryonics, the obvious cost is the non-trivial amount of money it would take. Maybe it would be better to find a way to store information about the brain in a computer until it could be restored. Maybe your brain would be better preserved in a jar of formaldehyde (although I'm hoping for the sake of cryonics customers that this isn't so, some of those who had their brains preserved for science might then gain an unexpected benefit).
So no, I don't think the success rate of not-cryonics is a guaranteed zero. I don't even think the future success rate of cryonics is a guaranteed zero, and you could convince me with more evidence that it is not an almost-certain zero. I would consider the successful revival of non-human animals of increasing complexity through cryonics a great first step to proving its viability. And I need more evidence of the expected benefits only because I have ample evidence of the expected costs (nobody is saying cryonics is free). Opportunity cost means that I should make choices not only with the consideration of what that choice might gain me, but also what passing up my other choices might cost me. That's why I think it's a better strategy to give money to life extension research now than save up to give to cryonics specifically to freeze me.
I hope that helps to clarify my thinking on this. I am wondering, what experimental evidence in favor of cryonics do you find most compelling? Are there other life-extension strategies you have considered?
EDIT: Curses...my HTML tricks will do me no good here (goes off to search for message board markup tags...)
EDIT: Yay! Fixed! Thanks for the help, @Mixed Nuts and @nsheppard!
Notice the little "Help" link under the comment box ;)
Thanks! I'm glad people are being so helpful with this.
What things could you possibly try in the present that couldn't also be used in the future on revival? There are lots of things that could theoretically be done to extend lifespans which we can't do now, but if any methods that are available now have similar effect, why shouldn't people in the future be able to apply them to at least equal effect?
Besides, measures like following a low calorie diet are not exclusive with signing up for cryonics, although having lived on a low calorie diet for about a month, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to live even a normal human life span on one, since it meant that immediately upon finishing each meal, my mind would become preoccupied with the prospect of the next one.
The trick i found with low calorie diet was to eat less meals :) but that's not as approachable for many people.
This does not seem to me to be a very solid objection. Cryonics doesn't depend logically on that even being possible.
Agreed. It may be a reason, but I don't think it is the main reason.
Effectively unknown more than effectively zero. The latter makes it sound like you're expecting revivals to have already happened to demonstrate that it works. Or that you have some other positive information that allows you to conclude that people cryopreserved today will never be revived.
This is very similar to my primary objection to cryonics.
I realize that, all factors considered, the expected utility you'd get from signing up for cryonics is extremely, if not infinitely, large. In any case, it's certainly large enough to be worth the price.
However, it seems to me that there are better alternatives. Sure, paying for cryonics increases your chances of an unlimited life by many orders of magnitude. On the other hand, funding longevity research makes it more likely that we will ever overcome aging and disease. Unlimited life for most or all of the future human population is far more important than unlimited life for yourself, right? (One might object that life extension research is already on its way to accomplishing this regardless of your contributions, which brings me to my next point.)
If an existential risk comes to pass, then no one will have a chance at an unlimited life. All of the time and money spent on cryonics will go to waste, and life extension research will have been (mostly) squandered. Preventing this sort of risk is therefore far more important than preserving any one person, even if that person is you. To make matters worse, there are multiple existential risks that have a significant chance of happening, so the need for extra attention and donations is much greater than the need for extra longevity research.
To summarize: Cryonics gives you alone a significant chance of gaining unlimited life. Working to prevent existential risk gives billions of people a slightly increased chance of the same.
It seems to me we shouldn't be spending money on freezing ourselves just in case a singularity (or equivalent scientific progress) happens. Instead, we should focus on increasing the chances that it will happen at all. To do anything else would be selfish.
Ok, time to take a step back and look at some reasons I might be wrong.
First, and perhaps most obviously, people are not inclined to donate all their money to any cause, no matter how important. I freely admit that I will probably donate only a small fraction of my earnings, despite the arguments I made in this post. Plus, it's possible (likely?) that people would be more inclined to spend money on cryonics than on existential risk reduction, because cryonics benefits them directly. If someone is going to spend money selfishly, I suppose cryonics is the most beneficial way to do so.
Second, there's a chance I misestimated the probabilities involved, and in fact your money would be best spent on cryonics. If the Cryonics Institute webpage is to be believed, the cheapest option costs $28,000, which is generally covered by insurance, costing you $120 per year (this option also requires a one-time payment of $1,250). Unfortunately, I have no idea how much $1,250 plus $120 per year would help if donated to SIAI or another such organization. Cryonics certainly give a huge expected reward, and I'm just guessing at the expected reward for donating.
Am I alone in actually liking life? Are the rest of my compatriots so eager to die?
You are not alone.
Consider Eliezer's "proof" that he wants to live forever: "I want to live one more day. Tomorrow I will still want to live one more day. Therefore I want to live forever, proof by induction on the positive integers."
The breakdown, of course, is the belief that all tomorrows are the same. Some people realise that youth is temporary, and so don't look forward too much to being 70, because as infirmities crop up life gets less pleasant until they could take it or leave it. So, they like life- when life is good, and realize that life won't always be good. They also view life extension in terms of time-discounted pleasure, and so if they have to regularly starve themselves in order to live longer when they're 70, they won't because overall life pleasure will be lower.
As a young person, I am shocked and horrified by the idea of being 70.
Yet I suspect that when I am 70, I will want to live one more day.
I suspect that when I am 70, I will feel like I've lived a complete life, and it's now more important for other people to be happier than for me to survive longer.
Even less alone.
For many reasons, revealed preferences point to the answer being "yes", if for some reason you want to model humans as rational.
That is an interesting and concerning view. Cryonics makes the usual argument:
And the average person does not agree with the conclusion. They might not be consciously aware of why they don't want to live forever, but they damn well know that idea doesn't appeal to them. The cryonics advocate presses them for a reason, and the average person unknowingly rationalises when they give their reason - they refuse the second premise on some grounds - scam, won't work, evil future empire, whatever. The cryonics advocate resolves that concern, demonstrates that cryonics does have a chance of working, and the person continues to refuse.
Cryonics advocate checks if they refuse premise 1 - person emphatically responds that they love life not because they actually do, but because it is a huge status hit / social faux pas / Bad Thing (tm) to admit they don't. Actually, their life sucks, and dragging it out forever will make it worse, but they can't say this out loud - they probably can't even think it to themselves.
Wow. It's kinda scary to think that people refusing cryonics is a case of revealed preferences, and that revealed preference is that they don't like life. Actually, it might not be scary, it might just be against social norms. But I'd like to think I genuinely like life and want life to be worth living for everyone. Of course, I'd say that if it was a social norm to say that. Damn.
It could also be a revealed preference that they don't like life enough to give their fate completely into the hands of unknown future people, or simply that they don't think the probability of successful cryonics + a good future is high enough to justify the costs.
Actually, when you put the argument for cryonics like this, it kind of sounds like a version of Pascal's Mugging. Perhaps we could call this: Pascal's Benefactor.
It's just Pascal's regular Wager.
Edit: I mean, this presentation makes it look like Pascal's Wager. Cryonics is too high-probability to actually be Pascal's Wager.
As MixedNuts pointed out, it's Pascal's Wager - yet you have a point. Putting the argument like this might cause the Pascal's Wager Fallacy Fallacy (which is still one of my favourite posts on this site).
Hm! Someone I know wants to write a post called "Pascal's Wager Fallacy Fallacy Fallacy", because (the claim is) that post doesn't correctly analyze the relevant social psychology involved when someone is afraid of being seen to commit to a very-possibly-indefensible-in-retrospect position where they predict they'll be seen as to-the-other-person-unjustifiably having chosen a predictably immoral or stupid course of action, or something like that.
Then it would make sense to call it "Not-taking-social-costs-into-consideration Fallacy" but not "Pascal's Wager Fallacy Fallacy Fallacy". That post wasn't really about the feasibility of cryonics, it only made claims about the logical validity of comparing the reasoning behind cryonics to Pascal's Wager and that's not something that can be affected by social psychology.
See this comment. (Disclaimer 1: it's mine. Disclaimer 2: my objection isn't really about the social psychology involved -- but I think that gives it more right to use the word "fallacy".)
Probably false.
People don't find flimsy excuses to refuse conventional life-saving treatments, and non-conventional treatments can become conventional (say, antibiotics). This holds, though less so, even if the treatments cost quality of life and money.
I didn't start out liking life, but I seem to be very atypical in that regard (often suffer from anhedonia, for example). But it's more likely that I've moved away from the norm, not toward it, especially since I'm bad at distinguishing norms for X from norms for "X"... shudder
Scary. Someone please disprove this.
That logic only holds if there's no cost, or no alternate investment. Currently the cost of cryonics is ~$28,000. If I donated that to GiveWell instead, I'd be saving ~28 lives. The question of whether I want to be immortal or save 28 mortal lives, is not one I've seen much addressed, and not one that I've yet found a satisfying answer to.
I've given it a lot of thought, and this does appear to be my True Rejection of Cryonics; if I can find a satisfying reasoning to value my immortality over those 28 mortal lives, I'd sign up.
Have you spent $28,000 on nonessentials for yourself over the course of your life? Most people can easily hit that amount by having a nicer car and house/apartment than they "need". If so then by revealed preference, you value those nonessentials over 28 statistical lives; do you also value them over a shot at immortality?
I find the answer "be immortal" satisfying, personally. Your mileage may vary.
May I ask what reasoning/evidence lead you to that conclusion? I'm sort of viewing it as a trolley problem: I can either kill my immortal self, or I can terminate 28 other lives that much sooner than they would have.
(I'm also realizing my conclusion is probably "I don't do THAT much charitable to begin with, so let's just go ahead and sign up, and we can re-route the insurance payoff if we suddenly become more philanthropic in the future")
Evidence is a wrong question, and reasoning not much better. Unless, of course, you mean "evidence and reasoning about my own arbitrary preferences". In which case my personal testimony is strong evidence and even stronger for me given that I know I am not lying.
I prefer immortality over saving 28 lives immediately. I also like the colour "blue".
What epistemic algorithms would you run to discover more about your arbitrary preferences and to make sure you were interpreting them correctly? (Assuming you don't have access to an FAI.) For example, what kinds of reflection/introspection or empiricism would you do, given your current level of wisdom/intelligence and a lot of time?
It's a good question, and ruling out the FAI takes away my favourite strategy!
One thing I consider is how my verbal expressions of preference will tend to be biased. For example if I went around saying "I'd willingly give up immortality to prevent 28 strangers from starving" then I would triple check my belief to see if it was an actual preference and not a pure PR soundbite. More generally I try to bring the question down to the crude level of "what do I want?", eliminating distracting thoughts about how things 'should' be. I visualize possible futures and simply pick the one I like more.
Another question I like to ask myself (and frequently find myself asked by other people while immersed in SIAI affiliated culture) is "what if an FAI or Omega told you that your actual extrapolated preference was X?". If I find myself seriously doubting the FAI then that is rather significant evidence. (And also not an unreasonable position. The doubt is correctly directed at the method of extrapolating preferences instilled by the programmers or the Omega postulator.)
Look at it in terms of years gained instead of lives lost.
Saving 28 lives gives them each 50 years at best until they die, assuming none of them gain immortality. That's 1400 man-years gained. Granting immortality to one person is infinity years (in theory); if you live longer than 1400 years then you've done the morally right thing by betting on yourself.
Additionally, money spent on cryonics isn't thrown into a hole. A significant portion is spent on making cryonics more effective and cheaper for others to buy. Rich Americans have to buy it while it's expensive as much as possible, so that those 28 unfortunates can ever have a chance at immortality.
The game theory makes it non-obvious. Consider the benefits of living in a society where people are discouraged from doing this kind of abstract consequentialist reasoning.
You have not considered this thoroughly.
What are 28 mortal lives for one that is immortal? If I was asked to choose between the life of some being that shall live for thousands of years or the lives of thirty something people who shall live perhaps 60 or 70 years, counting the happy productive hours of life seems to favour the long lived. Of course they technically also have a tiny chance of living that long, but honestly what are the odds that absent any additional investment (which will have the opportunity cost of other short lived people), they have of matching the mentioned being's longevity?
Now suppose I could be relatively sure that the long lived entity would work towards making the universe, as much as possible, a place that in which I, as I am today, could find some value in, but of those thirty something individuals I would know little except that they are likley to be at the very best, at about the human average when it comes to this task.
What is the difference between a certainty of a two thousand year lifespan, or the 10% chance of a 20 000 year one? Or even a 0.5% chance of a 400 000 year life span? Perhaps the being can not psychologically handle living that much longer, but having assurances that it would do its best to self-modify so it could dosen't seem unreasonable.
Why should I then privilege the 28 because the potentially long lived being just happens to be me?
Only I can live forever. - is a powerful ethical argument if there is a slim but realistic chance of you actually achieving this.
(nods) Absolutely.
Unfortunately, I came installed with a fairly broken evaluator of chances, which tends to consistently evaluate the probability of X happening to person P differently if P = me than if it isn't, all else being equal... and it's frequently true that my evaluations with respect to other people are more accurate than those with respect to me.
So I consider judgments that depend on my evaluations of the likelihood (or likely consequences) of something happening to me vs. other people suspect, because applying them depends on data that I know are suspect (even by comparison to my other judgments).
But, sure, that consideration ought not apply to someone sufficiently rational that they judge themselves no less accurately than they judge others.
Then work towards the immortality of another. Dedicate your life to it.
That points out that people who think cryonics might work but forgo it because of the uncertainty of being bias towards themselves seldom consider committing to not get it for themselves yet provide it for another and then considering the issue while at the same time being a discreet call to join the Death Eaters.
I can't help myself but upvote it.
(nods) Yup, that makes more sense.
Ah, even muggles can be sensible occasionally.
And a good thing too, since we're all we've got.
Genuine question: would you push a big red button that killed 28 African children via malaria, if it meant you got free cryonic suspension? I'm fine with a brutal "shut up and multiply" answer, I'm just not sure if you really mean it when you say you'd trade 28 mortal lives for a single immortal one.
Ha ha ha. I find it amusing that you should ask me of all people about this. I'd push a big red button killing through neglect 28 cute Romanian orphans if it meant a 1% or 0.5% or even 0.3% chance of revival in an age that has defeated ageing. It would free up my funds to either fund more research, or offer to donate the money to cryopreserve a famous individual (offering it to lots of them, one is bound to accept, and him accepting would be a publicity boost) or perhaps just the raw materials for another horcrux.
Also why employ children in the example? Speaking of adults the idea seemed fine, children should probably be less of a problem since they aren't fully persons in exactly the same measure adults are no? It seems so attractive to argue to argue that killing a child costs the world more potential happy productive man years, yet have you noted that in many societies the average expected life span is so very low mostly because of the high child mortality? A 20 year old man in such a society has already passed a "great filter" so to speak. This is probably true in many states in Africa. And since we are on the subject...
There are more malnourished people in India than in all of sub-Saharan Africa, yet people always invoke an African example when wishing to "fight hunger". This is true of say efforts to eradicate malaria or making AIDS drugs affordable or "fighting poverty" or education intiatives, ect. I wonder why? Are they more photogenic?Does helping Africans somehow signal more altruism than helping say Cambodians? I wonder.
At least in the IT and call centre industries in the United States, "India" is synonymous with "cheap outsourcing bastards who are stealing our jobs." Quite a few customers are actively hostile towards India because they "don't speak English", "don't understand anything", and are "cheap outsourcing bastards who are stealing proper American jobs".
I absolutely hate this idiocy, but it's a pretty compelling case not to try and use India as an emotional hook...
I'd also assume that people are primed to the idea of "Africa = poor helpless children", so Africa is a much easier emotional hook.
Taken at face value, the comments above are those of a sociopath. This is so not because this individual is willing to sacrifice others in exchange for improved odds of his own survival (all of us do that every day, just by living as well as we do in the Developed World), but because he revels in it. It is even more ominous that he sees such choices as being inevitable, presumably enduring, and worst of all, desirable or just. Just as worrisome is the lack of response to this pathology on this forum, so far.
The death and destruction of other human beings is a great evil and a profound injustice. It is also extremely costly to those who survive, because in the deaths of others we lose irreplaceable experience, the opportunity to learn and grow ourselves, and not infrequently, invaluable wisdom. Even the deaths of our enemies diminishes us, if for no other reason than that they will not live long enough to see that they were wrong, and we were right.
Such a mind that wrote the words above is of a cruel and dangerous kind, because it either fails, or is incapable of grasping the value that interaction and cooperation with others offers. It is a mind that is willing to kill children or adults it doesn't know, and is unlikely to know in a short and finite lifetime, because it does not understand that much, if not almost all of the growth and pleasure we have in life is a product of interacting with people other than ourselves, most of whom, if we are still young, we have not yet met. Such a mind is a small and fearful thing, because it cannot envision that 10, 20, 30, or 500 years hence, it may be the wisdom, the comfort, the ideas, or the very touch of a Romanian orphan or of a starving sub-Saharan African “child” from whom we derive great value, and perhaps even our own survival. One of the easiest and most effective ways to drive a man mad, and to completely break his will, is to isolate him from all contact with others. Not from contact with high intellects, saintly minds, or oracles of wisdom, but from simple human contact. Even the sociopath finds that absolutely intolerable, albeit for very different reasons than the sane man.
Cryonics has a blighted history of not just attracting a disproportionate number of sociopaths (psychopaths), but of tolerating their presence and even of providing them with succor. This has arguably has been as costly to cryonics in terms of its internal health, and thus its growth and acceptance, as any external forces which have been put forward as thwarting it. Robert Nelson was the first high profile sociopath of this kind in cryonics, and his legacy was highly visible: Chatsworth and the loss of all of the Cryonics Society of California's patients. Regrettably, there have been many others since.
It is a beauty of the Internet that it allows to be seen what even the most sophisticated psychological testing can often not reveal: the face of the florid sociopath. Or perhaps, in this case I should say, the name of same, because putting a face to that name is another matter altogether.
I imagine that's the point of writing under a Voldemort persona.
To be absolutely clear, the commenter you are responding to is a troll and a fictional character.
I'm curious as to how you know "Voldemort" is a troll?
If you donated that to VillageReach, you'd be saving about 28 lives. If you donated that to GiveWell, you'd help them to find other charities that are similarly effective.
That's an interesting point. I am signed up for cryonics, but I'm actually rather ambivalent about my life. One major wrinkle is that, if cryonics does succeed, it would almost certainly have to be in a scenario where aging was solved by necessary precursor technologies. For me, a large chunk of my ambivalence is simply the anticipated decline in health as I age. By the same token, existential risks that might prevent me from, for instance, living from age 75 to age 85 tend not to worry me much.
Growing up religious I assumed I'd have a second different (not necessarily better), chance at life, that wouldn't have an expiration date. As I grew up I saw the possibility grew more distant and less probable in my mind.
I still feel entitled to at least get a try at a second one. Also for the past few years I generally feel much of the things I vaule will be lost and destroyed and that they are probably objectively out of my reach to try and save. So perhaps a touch of megalomania also plays a role or maybe I just want to be the guy to scream:
"YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! OH, DAMN YOU! GODDAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!"
I've met that guy-- I was talking about life extension with a random person-- he sounded like he was in his thirties. He didn't want life extension because his life was bad (ordinary job-- he was doing a survey for a bank, and this was probably about ten years ago) and he didn't want more of it and couldn't imagine things being any better.
Working conditions are somewhat better for Europeans (the author writes about a two-week vacation), but they aren't scrambling to sign up for cryonics.
Extended families are great if you're in a good one. My impression is that a fair number of people want to get away from them, but I don't know what the proportion is compared to people in nuclear families.
Michael Vassar had (has?) a theory that the three things which keep people trapped and which keep getting more expensive-- housing, credentialed education, and medical care-- are monopolized.
It would be interesting if, just as work on FAI has led to an interest in improving access to rationality, work on life extension leads to work on improving quality of life.
Cryogenics pretty much isn't AVAILABLE in most of Europe. Not at a price, acceptability, or reliability comparable to the US at least.
Why not? Does this seem like a good investment opportunity (for people who actually have money)?
It almost certainly is. I have no idea why nobody have done it, but I'd guess some kind of coordination fail is involved. If you know any European investors you should tip them of on this, it could save lives.
It's really annoying not knowing or being the kind of person who can do stuff. My brain seems to generate potential brilliant business plans and million-dollar-ideas at an alarming rate and not having to force myself to forget them all the time so that they wont haunt me with possibilities just out of reach would probably be good for my mental health.
Does it seem that way?
That's what I said. It almost certainly is a thing that seems that way. I don't know if it actually seems that way, and even if it seem that way it might not actually be that way... um, guess I could have expressed that more clearly.
I'm signed up, and I'm in the UK. The options aren't as good, but you take what you can get.
I like that theory of Vassar's because it fits my personal experience.
I was raised in an extremely religious household which caused me to miss out on advanced education. The internet has alleviated that to a degree, but the credentialed part certainly hasn't been alleviated. By the time I "woke up" from the indoctrination of being raised in such a religious household, I was already approaching 30 years old and relatively unwealthy while at the same time being stuck with the work skills I was taught while growing up...that is construction and remodeling of homes. While I have made the best of that by being self-employed, it certainly has kept me from doing what I really would like to do when I "grow up".
The internet has really been a boon for me as I self educated in software development and am slowly working to transition over to making my living from doing that. That's closer to what I would rather do, but I doubt I'll ever be able to get to the point where I can do what I really would love (research in any of the scientific fields I'm interested in...CS/medicine/AI/physics). At times this can be quite depressing and it feels like the person I was, was wasted.
However, all this makes me more of a fan of cryonics. Second chances and all that.
Mitchell Porter wrote something with a similar message.
Got me wondering about a charity that signs up important (mostly in the sense of being interesting) people for cryonics: the charity would work on convincing them and covering the cost.
My impression of all sorts of people is that they have lots of pleasure on a daily minute-to-minute level from lots of sources. (Not every minute, but often enough to consider themselves happy if you ask them superficially when they're in a good mood.) However, the emphasis on existential happiness is spot-on. Most people don't even think about existential happiness, but you can measure it in what they do. I think the bad choices people make over and over (the first teen pregnancy, then the second one, not arriving to work on time when they most need the job) is evidence that they feel fatalistically unhappy and at some level are passive-aggressively sabatoging what is at core a crappy life. This latter bit is from U.S. culture. I don't remember what it was like in Europe at the moment (though I might hypothesize that a certain cultural cynicism is actually protective and comforting) and I think some Eastern Europeans I've met have a culture that existential happiness is unobtainable or meaningless and they are strong for that and I fail to interpret what seemed like ennui or indifference in some African families I spent time with.
Personally, I'm highly motivated and I think I make 'carpe-diem-type' decisions. Yet when I get too enthusiastic about something, I do (deliberately) temper that down with reminders that I'll be 'old' in a subjectively short period of time; it's not like I'll live forever. I do this because I don't want it to be such a rude shock as things start changing over the decades. In other words, even though I relatively have a lot of subjective freedom, I feel existential angst too.
That's interesting about not letting yourself feel too happy. Is preventing a rude shock which may not happen (you could die suddenly or anti-aging tech could be developed) worth putting the brakes on feeling happy?
I've realized that one reason [1] I don't reliably allow coordinated joint mobility in T'ai Chi is that it doesn't feel natural/allowable for me to feel that good. I'm not sure what's behind that.
[1] The other reason is that it takes a lot of mental focus to change movement habits.
Perhaps. I make a lot of choices that are aimed to mitigate the negatives[1] I anticipate of being older. Other reasons that I do it are to just keep a balanced whole-lifetime perspective and curb manic tendencies.
[1] I wanted to add that this doesn't mean I anticipate mostly negatives. In any case I feel that since being older relative to my current self might last for decades I should focus on that self more than people seem to.
I must look into coordinated joint mobility ... would it feel as good for anyone?
I think it would feel good for anyone, but I'm not sure what proportion of people already have it. Anyone who's a natural athlete would have it.
"Coordinated joint mobility" is what I what I came up with to call what my teacher is trying to teach me. I don't know whether it's got a standard name.
The general idea is that skilled movement involves moving at least a little through a lot of joints. If people are unsure of what they're doing, they'll try to simplify the process by moving as few joints as possible. (The Frailty Myth, a book about women and sports, has somewhat on the subject-- there've been studies on how people learn to throw, and it turns out that "throwing like a girl" (throwing from the shoulder instead of involving the whole body) is exactly equivalent to throwing like someone who's unskilled at throwing.)
Feldenkrais Method is very good for preventing some of the effects of aging. The idea is that if you don't use part of your movement repertoire, you forget you have it. Feldenkrais has gentle repeated movements that remind you of your range of possibilities.
(Copying over my comment from there)
Indeed. It takes a lot of willpower to live from day to day. I am reminded of Hal Finney’s article announcing his ALS diagnosis, Dying Outside ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ab/dying_outside/ ):
Or (thank goodness for Evernote which lets me refind those old citations) http://www.fastcompany.com/node/52717/print :
It seems to me that most life-saving medical procedures are done at the time of need. People tend not to get their appendix removed "as a precaution", and the most preventative care I can think of is an annual visit and vaccinations (and somehow we have managed to get a small segment of the population stupid enough to start protesting even that...)
I have no clue what the numbers are, but how many people actually have a will? A medical directive? Actively engage in preventative care before they have a problem? How many people go so far as to invest a large sum of money in advance, to ensure their health?
The most I've heard of is basic lifestyle changes: exercise more, eat healthy, regular checkups. In a different vein, setting up a will or an advanced medical directive. That's it. I can't think of a single example of someone spending $10,000 today, in order to prevent something ten years down the road.
Women with a high hereditary risk of breast cancer sometimes opt to have both their breasts removed pre-emptively. People take statins and blood pressure drugs for years to prevent heart attacks. Don't you have eye tests and dental checkups on a precautionary basis? There's plenty of preventative medical care.
Maybe the availability and marketing varies between countries - the fact that you assume people have to invest their own money to ensure their health suggests you're from the US or another country with a bad healthcare system. My country has a national health service which takes an interest in encouraging preventative medicines like statins, helping people give up smoking, and so on, since that saves it money overall. I'm sure the allocation of preventative care is far from ideal and shaped by political and social factors and drug company lobbying, but it does exist.
It would be a bad tradeoff to go through painful appendectomy to prevent the small chance that you might get appendicitis (and you can get your appendix removed when it's actually infected, and the appendix may have an evolutionary function acting as a reservoir of gut bacteria, and it can also be used to reconstruct the bladder).
I tend to view there as being a strong difference between "go for a 2 hour checkup" and "invest $28K in cryonics". I wasn't aware of the pre-emptive breast removals, though, that would definitely qualify as the sort of thing I was looking for - and I still wonder how common it is, amongst people who would benefit.
I'm not aware of any country whose socialized healthcare pays for cryonics, so cryonics is certainly an out-of-pocket cost. If I'm wrong, please let me know so that I can move ASAP :)
That does make me wonder if cryonics is a harder sell in countries with socialized healthcare, just because people aren't used to having to pay for healthcare at all. The US, at least, is used to the idea of spending money on that scale.
When I said "you assume people have to invest their own money to ensure their health" I was obviously referring to preventative medical interventions, which is what you were actually asking about, not cryonics.
The breast/ovarian cancer risk genes are BRCA 1/2 - I seem to remember reading that half of carriers opt for some kind of preventative surgery, although that was in a lifestyle magazine article called something like "I CUT OFF MY PERFECT BREASTS" so it may not be entirely reliable. I'm sure it's not just a tiny minority who opt for it, though. I'm sure there are better figures on Google Scholar.
If you consider the cost of taking statins from age 40 to 80, in total that's a pricy intervention.
Maybe the lack of people using expensive preventative measures is because few of them exist - or few of them have benefits which outweigh the side-effects/pain/costs - not that people don't want them in general. If there was a pill that cost $30,000 and made you immune to all cancer with no side effects, I'm sure everyone would want it.
I think the real issue is that people don't consider cryonics to be "healthcare". That seems reasonable, because it's a mixture of healthcare and time travel into an unknown future where you might be put in a zoo by robots for all anybody knows.
Disproportionate compared to ... what? Criminals, as in people who get convicted, are a pretty dim group overall.
If his point was that all else being equal "social coping skills" are valued in society, well duh. Humans are social animals. I however suspect this particular formulation was used because it (I believe falsely) implies there are huge losses of intelligence because of imprisonment, when they are probably negligible especially considering poor "social cooping skills" often impose costs on others.
It's a well documented trend that criminals in jail for committing more serious crimes, especially the sociopaths and murderers, are generally of higher average individual intelligence (as measured by things like IQ tests) compared with the local population in which they live. And that's just the criminals that get convicted. (Although street crime, on the other hand, tends to have bellow-average IQ perpetrators.)
Studies have also found that areas with populations of lower average intelligence tend to have more crime, but that's a very different statement entirely.
If humankind survives long enough for upload/immortality to become possible, then the living people of that time, or the recently dead, will do equally or better for the task than long frozen corpses. Yes the technology may quickly develop and be able to upload frozen brains, but it is not required.
I do not agree with calculations linearly summing the worth of immortal beings. My guess is that the return will quickly saturates: once you have a being that is willing and capable to improves itself, no more uploads are required. The immortal being can acquire diversity in other ways, and may create diversity too (you don't need a human body to do that). The amount of redundancy in two humans is incredibly high compared to the possibilities in being-space.
Would it have no cost to me and humankind, I would sign up. But given the resources required, I don't think anyone should do it (in the same way that I don't think anyone should drive a Hummer in a city).
I deem that I have other means of becoming "immortal" that are more efficient (yes, including "having kids and transferring them part of my values/knowledge"). My take is that intelligent people should spend their energy trying to convince the population to minimize existential risks, not to sign up for cryonics.
Would it change your mind if the resource cost per person goes down the more people do it? That is something that is not true of people driving a Hummer -- or burial in a graveyard for that matter.
Yes, if large economy of scales changes the situation before I die, I may change my mind.
Here are some points that may help identify the source of the disagreement.
For a given amount of resources, the benefits of cryonics have (among other things) to be compared to the benefits of increasing the probability to reach the technological level enabling the upload (i.e. before extinction of the specie).
The utility of uploading 10^10 people is not 10 times greater than the one of uploading 10^9 people.
If part of a transhuman being to which I have not been uploaded happens to turn out as I would have myself, then I am already there.
This is a fantastically burdensome explanation for why people don't sign up for cryonics. Do people who do sign up for cryonics usually have happier lives? (Not that I've heard of.) Do the same people who turn down cryonics turn down other forms of medical care? (Not that I've heard of.) If we found that people signing up for cryonics were less happy on average, would we be able to construct an equally plausible-sounding symmetrical argument that people with happy, fulfilled lives see no need for a second one? (Yes.)
I hate to go into psychologizing, but I suspect that Mike Darwin wants a grand narrative of Why, Oh Why Cryonics Fails, a grand narrative that makes sense of this shocking and incomprehensible fact and gives some info on what needs to be done to relieve the frustration.
The truth is that people aren't anything like coherent enough to refuse cryonics for a reason like that.
Asking them about cryonics gets their prerecorded verbal behaviors about "immortality" which bear no relation whatsoever to their feelings about whether or not life is fun.
Remember the fraction of people that take $500 for certain over a 15% chance of $1 million? How could you possibly need any elaborate explanation of why they don't sign up for cryonics? Risk-aversion, loss-aversion, ambiguity-aversion, status quo bias.
Cryonics sounds strange and not-of-our-tribe and they don't see other people doing it, a feeling expressed in words as "weird". It's perceptually categorized as similar to religions or other scams they've heard about from the newspaper, based purely on surface features and without any reference to, or remediability by, the strength of the underlying logic; that's never checked. Mike Darwin thinks that if you have better preservation techniques, people will sign up in droves, because right now they're hearing about cryonics and rejecting it because the preservation techniques aren't good enough. This is obviously merely false, and the sort of thing which makes me think that Mike Darwin needs a grand narrative which tells him what to do to solve the problem, the way that Aubrey de Grey thinks that good enough rejuvenation results in mice will grandly solve deathism.
I recently got a phone call saying that, if I recall correctly, around a quarter - or maybe it was half - of all Alcor's cryonics signups this year, are originating from LW/Yudkowsky/rationality readers. If you want people to sign up for cryonics, the method with by far the strongest conversion ratio is to train them from scratch in advanced sanity techniques. Nothing else that cryonics advocates have tried, including TV ads, has ever actually worked. There's no simple reason people don't sign up, no grand narrative, nothing that makes sense of cryonicists' frustration, people are just crazy in rather simple and standard ways. The only grand narrative for beating that is "soon, your annual signups will equal 10% of the people who've gone through a rationality bootcamp plus 1% of the people who've read both Eliezer's nonfiction book and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality."
Your conclusion doesn't follow from your premise. Moreover I don't know what you mean by "advanced sanity techniques." I agree that you've probably increased to number of cryonics signups substantially but I doubt that increased rationality has played a significant role.
The implication of the latter quote is that the sanity techniques are being applied, and cryonics is being signed up for largely because of its merits.
I think that the former quote captures more of what is going on. A community is being created in which cryonics isn't as weird, removing previous barriers without implicating rationality directly.
I have a testable prediction that can partially parse out at least one factor. One disproportionately powerful influence on human beings in addition to (and mutually reinforcing) group think/behavior is accepting authority. (It is true that what others do is valid evidence for the validity of what they are doing, and is greater evidence the more the other(s) resemble(s) (an) optimal reasoning system(s) and is/are informed,)
I predict that if/as it becomes better known that Eliezer Yudkowsky signed up with the Cryonics Institute and not Alcor, the ratio of people signing up with Alcor and citing LW/HPATMOR to the people signing up with the Cryonics Institute and citing LW/HPATMOR will decrease.
"I think that the former quote captures more of what is going on. A community is being created in which cryonics isn't as weird, removing previous barriers without implicating rationality directly."
Very much so. People don't actually believe in the future.
Unfortunately that has an element of truth in it. Cryonics now has a reputation has a paleo-future fad from the 1960's, along with visions of space colonization, the postindustrial leisure society and the like. Many of the articles about Robert Ettinger's recent suspension present that as a subtext in describing his career. For example. the Washington Post obit says:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/from-phyics-teacher-to-founder-of-the-cryonics-movement/2011/07/24/gIQAupuIXI_story.html
With the implication that in our disillusioned era, Ettinger sounds like a crank and a fool.
I'm not sure that the intent was quite that harsh. "a crank and a fool" wasn't in the original obit. To view Ettinger's optimism as more in keeping with the zeitgeist of the 1960s than of the 2010s does not seem wholly unreasonable. Just in stark economic terms, U.S. real median household income peaked back in 1999. The median person in the U.S. has lost quite a lot over the last decade: income, security, access to health care, perhaps social status (as Vlaimir_M pointed out). It isn't unreasonable of them to disbelieve in an improving future.
It sometimes seems to me that many Lesswrongers seriously underestimate the degree to which they need to first persuade the skeptical to adopt transhumanism/singulatarianism more generally before cryonics is actually going to appear rational to them.
Revival from cryonics that involved growing a new biological body using the original DNA would have the broadest appeal, but accepting this conception of cryonics requires convincing people either a)that we are going to solve our topsoil and other issues that would actually allow us to feed the exploding biological population that would result from mass use of cryonics or b)people should stop having children, neither of which people are likely to accept unless they're already inclined to singulatarianism (for a) or transhumanism (for b).
Revival from cryonics with a cybernetic body is going to seem less appealing to most people unless they've already been convinced that a number of things that are currently inherent in being human are not actually essential to their identity. Revival as an emulation faces the same problem to a vastly greater degree.
TL;DR version – Not accepting transhumanism might be irrational. Not accepting cryonics given that one is not already a transhumanist – not irrational. Lesswrongers should plan their outreach accordingly.
With all due respect, where's the evidence that reading LW/HPMOR trains people in advanced sanity techniques?
It seems reasonably plausible that, for example, Harry's argument with Dumbledore primes people toward "death is bad". If they hang around long enough and read what LW has to say about cryonics, that priming tends some fraction of those people toward subscribing to cryonics, without them learning anything about e.g. Bayes' law.
But I don't know, I don't know the numbers. What's the readership of HPMOR versus Alcor's 2011 signups?
Rationality Bootcamp and Advanced Sanity Techniques? The first things sane and rational people do, are to exercise due diligence in gathering the facts before they make crazy and unfounded public statements such as:
1) "I suspect that Mike Darwin wants a grand narrative of Why, Oh Why Cryonics Fails, a grand narrative that makes sense of this shocking and incomprehensible fact and gives some info on what needs to be done to relieve the frustration." and
2) "Mike Darwin thinks that if you have better preservation techniques, people will sign up in droves, because right now they're hearing about cryonics and rejecting it because the preservation techniques aren't good enough."
Really? Not only don't I believe those things to be true, I've never said that they were. Au contraire, the only grand narrative of why people haven't embraced cryonics in droves is a very complicated one which, onto 40 years later, I'm still learning about and struggling to fully understand. In 1981 I wrote an article (with Steve Bridge) entitled "The Bricks in the Wall" about the many reasons why people find it difficult to embrace cryonics: http://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics8111.txt. If I recall correctly, there were at least a dozen reasons given in that essay, including things like loss of others, loss of self, lack of technical confidence, incompatible worldview, high social cost, fear of temporal displacement... Since that article was written, I've learned of many more reasons why people reject cryonics and why they don't decide to opt for it - which, as it turns out, can be two very different things.
Ironically, much of my career in cryonics has been spent arguing against "the big idea," "the grand solution," "the magic bullet," or "the single rich individual who will provide the solution to the problem of why cryonics has fared so poorly." There is no single reason, unless you want to consider the myriad individual reasons, in aggregate, as a single cause of the failure. If you insist on that approach, then the best you will do (and you could do far worse) is to note that by any normal market standards, cryonics is a shitty product. It costs a lot, it is unproven, there are many commonplace reasons to believe that existing institutional structures have a poor chance of surviving long enough for the patients to be recovered, it has been plagued by legitimate scandals and failures and the constraints imposed by the existing medico-legal infrastructure mean that, statistically, you've got a ~30% chance of being autopsied, or otherwise so badly degraded that whoever it is that is recovered from the procedure isn't very likely to be you (e.g., presumably if your DNA is intact a clone could be made). So cryonics doesn't stack up very well as a normal market product.
Having said that, if you want to 'sell' cryonics as part of brainwashing package, or a religion, I'd be the first to say that it can probably done. It has been my observation that you can get people to do almost anything if you rob them of their will, and subvert their reason. For myself, I don't think that's a good idea.
As to the issue of improved preservation techniques causing people to sign up in droves, surely you jest? Any improvement in cryopreservation techniques short of fully reversible suspended animation will 'only' have an incremental effect. So for example, if organ cryopreservation for the kidney were achieved tomorrow, and organ banks for kidneys opened their doors 6 months later, I would indeed expect to see an increase in people opting for cryonics, but not a stampede.
Historically, the same was true of the introduction into cryonics of credible ideas for repairing cryoinjury and of scientific documentation that brain ultrastructure was surviving cryopreservation (under ideal conditions) reasonably well. Both of those advances widened the appeal of cryonics to a very small group of people. Nevertheless, they were significant, because if you have 40 members, and such advances give you 240, or a 1,040 - then that's a huge benefit.
Finally, if reversible whole body suspended animation were developed tomorrow, the vast majority of people would still not opt for it. In fact, they more or less never would. What would have to happen first is that a relatively small cohort of the population who command respect, authority and power, would have to decide that it is in their interest to have suspended animation become a commonplace medical treatment. By this, I do not mean to imply some focused or intelligent cabal, or group of conspirators, but rather that all kinds of empowered people in many walks of life must be persuaded before the society at large will embrace cryonics. In other words, it will be a process and probably a complex one, before Mrs. Smith sits in her doctor's office and is either offered, or asks about, suspended animation as a possible alternative to her ending up dead from her advanced ovarian cancer.
In my opinion there are no magic bullets. Rather, there are just a lot bricks in a large wall of opposition that have to be patiently worried away, one, or a few at a time. It's all too easy to see TV coverage of the Berlin Wall coming down and say, "Jeeze, look how quick and easy that was!" Not. The back-story needs to be considered and in the case of cryonics that back-story has been unfolding for nearly fifty years - and there are still less than 2K people signed up worldwide.
Finally, it is indeed a cruel and unpleasant reality that life isn't very rewarding for many people, and that it all but completely lacks the zest, joy and wonderful sense of adventure that can be seen in the eyes of any well cared for child. The biology of maturation and aging do much to drain away that sense of wonder and appetite for life. But it is much more likely the case that the way we lead our lives is the primary culprit. I recommend watching multiple episodes of a TV program called "Undercover Boss." Just watch what people who work in factories, in offices, in laundries and in loo cleaning businesses do all day. It is horrible. It is, in fact, the exact opposite of the situation we DEMAND that children be in. Indeed, one of the most repellant things to people in the West is "child labor." Well, if the normal workaday work is so horrible for children, what makes it good for adults? And if we propose to live for millennia, and longer, then don't we, by definition, have to be as children: open, mobile, playful and exploring in our interaction with the world? I have done all kinds of jobs, from working at Mc Donald's (2 years) to cleaning loos and dirty motel rooms. Work is a good and character building thing. But it can also be a corrosive and soul destroying thing that robs people of any strong desire to fight for life. Methinks that perhaps you need to work at McDonald's dressing hamburger buns for a year or two.
The concern that lesswrong might be a cult has been dealt with extensively already.
Like it or not, lesswrong is likely one of the greatest allies cryonics has right now -- and I would say this is not so much because of all the new recruits and fresh blood, but because of the training in rationality that it provides and ultimately injects into the cryonics community (among the other communities it intersects with). Because of this emphasis, lesswrong is actually pretty good insurance against cryonics becoming a cult.
I agree with almost all of what you say about no grand narrative and mostly just conformity, but I'm not willing to entirely dismiss this explanation as even a small part of the puzzle. It doesn't seem much different than the theories that poor people with few life prospects have higher temporal discount rates and are more likely to engage in risky/criminal behavior because they have less to protect. People aren't coherent enough to think "Well, stealing this watch has a small probability of landing me in prison, but my life now isn't so satisfying, so I suppose it's worth the risk, and I suppose it's worth risking a lot later for a small gain now since I currently have so little", but there's some inner process that gives more or less that result.
If even the few people who get past the weirdness factor flinch away from the thought of actually being alive more, I expect that would make a significant difference.
I'm going to try a test question that might differentiate between "cryonics sounds weird" and "I don't like life enough to want to live even more" on my blog. Obviously no one from here post on that since you already know where it's going.
Alternate hypotheses: your followers are mostly technophile singularitarians, and technophile singularitarians are attracted to cryonics independently of rationalist training. Your followers believe there may be a positive singularity, which means the future has a reason to be much better than the present and avoid the unpleasantness Darwin describes in the article. Your followers are part of maybe the one community on earth, outside the cryonics community itself, where the highest-status figures are signed up for cryonics and people are often asked to justify why they have not done so. Your followers are part of a community where signing up for cryonics signals community affiliation. Your followers have actually heard the arguments in favor of cryonics and seen intelligent people take them seriously, which is more than 99.9% of people can say.
Saw this after your post - guessed it was cryonics but didn't spill the beans.
I was about to comment there saying "I think I know what this is about, and if so he definitely means a younger healthy body rather than an 80-year-old one on the point of death" -- but I thought I'd check here, and I'll respect your preference for no cross-contamination. You might want to do that bit of disambiguation yourself.
Your LJ readers are probably not an entirely representative sample of people who aren't signed up for cryonics, though perhaps they are of {people who aren't signed up for cryonics but might be persuaded}.
I signed up as a result of reading Eliezer's writings. I don't think the first two points of your "alternate hypotheses" are really alternatives for me, since I only fall into either of those camps as a result of reading Eliezer.
Judging by the experiment with the secretly identical question, I seem to have been wrong. Everyone says they would jump at the chance to be reincarnated, so lack of desire to live longer apparently doesn't play as significant a role in cryonics refusal as I thought.
Your readers are still part of a contrarian cluster. (Hell, ciphergoth commented!) But I don't dispute the result.
Wow. I don't think I'd heard that one.
I was very surprised to see that too, to the point of questioning whether the result was real, but apparently it is. (The particular result is on page 10 — and possibly elsewhere, I haven't read it through yet.)
I guess some folks could really use $500.
Assuming you weren't joking, that doesn't seem likely. The PDF Tesseract linked is about surveying college students, primarily, from elite institutions like Harvard, MIT, Princeton, or CMU. They are people one would especially expect to be making the expected value calculation and going with that.
In that case, let's say I was joking ;)
I've been really impressed by the focused cross-pollination between transhumanism and rationality that I see at LW. I am not sure I would agree that increased individual rationality is the direct cause of increased cryonics signups because there are other explanations which seem more likely. As others have noted, this is a rare community where it is not weird, and is highly esteemed, to be signed up for cryonics.
And since humans are (at least in many situations) motivated by social factors more than abstract rational considerations, I expect the social factors to have more explanatory weight. That isn't to say cryonics is not more rational than the alternative of no cryonics! More like this community is one that tries (i.e. individuals are rewarded for trying) to build its standards on rationality, and reject standards which aren't, and cryonics is able to survive that process. If there were something grossly irrational or unethical about cryonics (as is commonly contended), it would not be able to survive very easily in the memesphere of lesswrong.
But this brings us back to the concept of "advanced" rationality. If you can a) keep your community continually pruned of bad ideas by shooting them down with the strongest logic available (and rewarding this behavior when it crops up), and b) let that community's norms dominate your decisions when they are strongly rationally grounded, the outcome is that you will be a more rational person in terms of decisions made. This is not less valid from the perspective of "rationality = winning" than divorcing yourself from social impulses and expending loads of willpower to contradict the norm.
It's more valid! It's why we have meet-ups, it's why SingInst runs rationality camps that are highly desired and applied for!
(Yes, I agree with you)
This was the first time I have seen Darwin's blog and it ate up much of my afternoon. He presents the most impassioned cryonics arguments I have seen. In particular the AIDS activism post is something I could recommend to anybody including die-hard cryonics haters.
Does Darwin ever post on LessWrong, and if not I would be curious why not?
To me the reason conventional wisdom treats cryonics with disdain may be summed up in two cultural memes: 1.) Walt Disney's frozen head and 2.) Ted Williams's frozen head. The disdain is like a fashion consensus. I doubt we will live long enough to ever see any public figure's pro publicity people endorsing a pro-cryonics stance.
Thank you very much for posting this here!
I'm glad to hear that; that was one of the goals - to introduce LW to Darwin a bit.
LW is a very recent thing. Darwin got involved in cryonics in, like, the 1960s. It's not surprising if, as he began polishing and dumping online what sometimes feels like decades of material, he didn't do so on some popular new transhumanist website; so there may be nothing there to explain. If there was, it may be that Darwin differs philosophically from LW in general (certainly Yudkowsky has vociferously criticized the excerpted post).
The reason I haven’t posted here before is that I’ve had no burning reason to, and I’m busy.
While there are many discrete reasons why cryonics hasn’t been (more) successful, the single biggest reason is the most obvious one; it has not been demonstrably shown to work. If suspended animation were a demonstrated reality tomorrow, and it was affordable (i.e., not like spaceflight, which is demonstrably workable, but not yet affordable) then the tide would be turned. Even then, it is unlikely there would be any kind of flash-stampede to the freezers.
A schoolmate and friend of mine just died a few weeks ago of pulmonary fibrosis. He was an ideal candidate for a lung transplant. But, he couldn’t afford it, so he just laid there and died. Thousands of people who need transplants die each year, even though it is a proven modality of treatment that is yielding a significant number of quality years of life. But, it is costly, there aren’t enough donors, and here’s the really remarkable thing, the vast majority of people who could benefit from a transplant are never even candidates.
Consider Richard DeVos, the co-founder of Amway: http://www.rickross.com/reference/amway/amway24.html. In 1983 DeVos, suffering from coronary artery disease, had bypass surgery. In 1992 DeVos had another bypass surgery, and by 1995 it was clear he had end stage congestive heart failure (CHF). How many people have you known or heard about who fit that description, and subsequently go on to die a perfectly pedestrian death; at home or in the ICU? Such deaths are so routine no one gives them a second thought.
And it’s for damn sure that no one gives them a second thought when the patient is a 71 year old man! However, if you are absolutely fixated on staying alive, and your net worth is well in excess of 2 billion 1997 dollars, well, the rules of the game are different for you. DeVos got his heart in London, and the Amway corporate jet flew him there from Grand Rapids, MI. That was in 1997, and as far as I know, DeVos is still alive. There are countless ~71 year old men in the US, and elsewhere in the Developed World, dying of CHF right now. In those cases, the word "transplant" is neither uttered nor heard – even though it is very much a reality that if you have the money, the persistence and the luck – a heart transplant offers the prospect of another 5 years of reasonably good quality life, on average.
I worked in hospital, mostly in critical care medicine, for 7 years. The overwhelming majority of patients are passive – they do what their physicians advise and if they do have alternative ideas, they are usually easily dissuaded from pursuing them. And, truth to tell, most of the “alternative ideas” patients have are bad ones, including Steve Jobs. But, if you are smart, lucky and rich – and you come to your senses, as Jobs did, it can be whole other ball game. Jobs suffered recurrent pancreatic cancer (islet cell neuroendocrine tumor) after a Whipple procedure in 2004. That is just about as close as you can get to a death sentence, since the usual location of the met(s) is the liver. It is current medical consensus that liver transplantation in patients with recurrent pancreatic cancer that has metastasized to the liver is contraindicated. In fact, I know a couple of transplant surgeons who call such a procedure a murderous waste of a liver, and a life! However, Jobs got a liver transplant in 2009. I strongly suspect that he has very recently received additional cutting edge treatment not widely available.
Cryopreservation/cryonics is likely to creep in on little cat’s feet – with a big jump or two along the way. Cryobanking of parenchymatous organs will probably be one jump, reversible cryopreservation of the brain another, and finally, whole body suspended animation. But it behooves us to beware that lots and lots of people are “calmly” accepting their fates today, who could in fact be ‘rescued’ by already extant medical technology - but for the knowledge, the money and the will. And THAT is what is NOT likely to change. To a surprising degree, people stay alive because it has been made very easy for them to do so. Make it difficult, and you start to see people dropping away.
Cryonics demands a very high passion for and commitment to staying alive, not just because it is currently such a lousy product, but because, to be really credible, it DEMANDS ACTION to improve the odds of its success. Most people are not activists, and what's more, most people will refuse a chance at more life when you take away the superficial things that they mistake for their person-hood, or identity. And cryonics proposes to do exactly that. There is historical precedent for this. In his incredibly insightful book, MAN'S SEARCH FOR MEANING, Viktor Frankl noted that the people in the Nazi concentration camps fell into two groups. The first group consisted of the majority of those interned there, and they were people who defined themselves in terms of their social milieu: if you asked them who they were, they would say, "I am a doctor, a lawyer, a mother..." The second group consisted of a small minority of people who thought of themselves as existing completely independent of any label, any role, or any relationship they had with others, or with society.
When you entered a concentration camp, they took away you clothes, your profession, your family and even your name. For most people, that was the equivalent of taking away their very identity, and thus their will to live. As Frankel observed, it was mostly only the people in second, much smaller group, that survived.
It is from that tiny minority in the population as a whole, that cryonics draws it adherents. They are people who want to live, regardless, and who do not define their sense of self on the basis of their jobs, their social interactions, or really, on anything other than a raw, visceral passion to survive. Some find that absolutely terrifying.
& then I found this on Darwin's site:
google ngram research on cryonics
Specifically he has a graph of "cryonics" (the word) citations in all periodicals scanned by google up to February 2011 versus time and it appears the most talked about item in the history of cryonics, ever, may well be Ted Williams's frozen head. He has a photograph of Williams in his article.
(& also I had never heard of this google ngram thing before and it looks remarkable.)
Yeah, N-gram can give some interesting insights. I used it for anime the other week.