ialdabaoth comments on Brain Preservation - Less Wrong
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Comments (108)
Hello! I'm going to expend karma to reply to you, twice (my response is too long to fit into one comment). I consider this worth it, on the off chance that I can impart knowledge to you that you will find useful. Please accept this as a genuine gesture of goodwill.
Leading in with this statement is an emotional tactic. People on this site are far better trained to recognize emotional tactics than they are to respond to them. Rather than flagging "I have high status and a willingness to inflict coercive force", your verbal hostility and boldness merely flag "I am attempting to subvert a rational conversation by playing to my audience's dominance instincts". This is a poor tactic to choose here, because people here are explicitly training themselves to not respond favorably to such tactics. Paradoxically, many people here actually respond negatively to such tactics, rather than ignoring them, because using those tactics indicates that you are not part of this community (i.e., not "pack").
Nothing has a probability rate of zero. If you wish to use this community's language (and it's always a good tactic to use the language of your audience), you should rather say "has a probability rate of epsilon". Also, capitalizing 'ZERO' and putting an exclamation point on the end connotes that you are speaking with a level of fervor and passion that most people here do not respond well to, when used to punctuate a numerical fact. Most people appear to respond better in this community, in my observations thus far, if you state your facts with as flat an implied affect as possible. Reserve your passion for your surprising conclusions; most people here respond very favorably to labile displays when expressing surprise - it seems to imply that you are excited at the opportunity to learn something new.
As a follow-up, if you actually state that something has a probability rate of epsilon, be prepared to have people challenge those numbers. This is a VERY math-based community.
Calling your audience stupid only works if you are pulling on their dominance strings. Most people here respond rather poorly to having their dominance triggers manipulated this crassly. Also, you said "unlikely" in parentheses, immediately after declaring in bold terms that the probability is ZERO! in the previous statement. This introduces stress fractures into your argument, as "unlikely" has a very different emotional connotation than ZERO! - it makes it easy for someone to respond with "which is it? Unlikely, or ZERO! probability? These are very different things."
Regrettably, the definition of "death" is not so cut-and-dry. Anyone who has researched medical ethics is familiar with the basic arguments, but ultimately, it comes down to the fact that brain death happens separately from organ death, happens separately in different portions of the brain than in other portions of the brain, and that revival is possible - although statistically less and less likely - at almost any point in the process, even with current technology. We can assume that future technology will be better than current technology, of course, barring some kind of information-destroying disaster.
In the time-scales we're talking about, "congress" may not even be a valid target for speculation anymore. Even if they are, politics in this country have vastly changed over the past 40 years, 80 years, 120 years, 160 years, etc.; there is no reason to doubt that they will continue to do so.
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