ialdabaoth comments on Brain Preservation - Less Wrong
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Comments (108)
I daresay people do think about that. But look at it this way: What's the failure rate for revivification after cremation? What's the failure rate for revivification after burial? I personally believe that these techniques have a potentially non-zero revivification rate (we don't know for certain that we can't work backwards from aggregate environmental data), but even so, freezing the brain whole is going to give us success probabilities which are orders of magnitude higher.
Speculating on future economics is less fruitful than speculating on future motivation. Here's an emotionally moving argument, whether or not it's accurate:
The economic and motivational behaviors of a society are flexible. Societies have existed which are motivated by scientific curiosity or concern for the well-being of their fellow man. Such societies are more likely to resurrect a cryonaut than a society which is motivated purely by selfish profit. This is a good thing, as it means that I am more likely to resurrect into a society which shares my motivational values, than one which holds motivational values which I find contemptuous.
This is, again, an emotional rather than a factual argument - you are attempting to force people's imagination to conjure familiar images of present-day economic working conditions. Statistically, the future is very unlikely to look like the present - note that the present, at any given point in history, looked very unlike its own past.
Again with the exclamation points. Also, mentioning union politics automatically hooks into people's political pack instincts, which degrades rational reasoning abilities. People here know this, so they tend to discount arguments which attempt to exploit such hooks.
Are you certain you understand how compound interest and investment work? This is directly from Wikipedia:
Also, are you certain that you know how future economies will operate? "Money" may not necessarily continue to be a prime motivator.
Continuing to show contempt for your audience is an excellent dominance display, but very poor at engaging rational thinking skills. Again - this site is about rational thinking skills. You will not do well to play primate-level affect-manipulation games here. If you want to perform affect-manipulation games here, you need to appeal to higher order emotional responses (pride in the reader's intelligence, for example, or wonder and excitement at future possibility).
This is actually a potentially valid argument, which (along with your "what will the failure rate be?" point) merits serious consideration. Historically, technologies are not fairly distributed. People should be having better discussions about the fairness of transhuman/post-singularity technologies. Your voice could lend valid input to that process, if you could learn to speak more clearly about it.
That seems patently absurd. There are MULTIPLE famous people from the past, that Hollywood has spent millions of dollars creating the illusion of "resurrecting". If it were possible to legitimately resurrect famous people, I daresay some reality / news commentary channel would be willing to spend millions of dollars per head just to resurrect them, for no other reason than to make a guest panel for some commentary show.
This argument actually has a kernel of truth and importance to it, which you utterly buried in contempt for your audience. Why are you deliberately weakening your own argument, when you have important things to say? Nevermind your failure to respect your audience; you are failing to respect yourself. Why are you doing this? What you are saying is too important to cover in shit like this.
Why do you believe that attacking an argument necessitates denigrating the arguer? Facts should stand on their own merits; why are you feeling the need to repeatedly insult the people you are communicating with?
I'm afraid I don't follow this at all; each sentence seems to have no connection to the previous, other than to convey a vague emotional sense of superiority, hostility and disdain. In what way do you believe that will help you "win" this argument?
I would tend to agree.
You appear to be confused; how can I help?