I understood Dunning-Kruger quite well. Dunning-Kruger suggests that, barring outside influence, people will believe themselves to be of above-average ability. Incompetent people will greatly overestimate their capability and understanding, and the ability to judge talent in others was proportional to ability in the skill itself - in other words, people who are incompetent are not only incompetent, but also incapable of judging competence in other people.
Competent people, conversely, overestimate the competence of the incompetent; however, they do have the ability to judge incompetence, so when they are allowed to look at the work of others relative to their own, their estimation of their own personal ability more closely matches their true ranking - while incompetent people being exposed to the work of others had no such effect, though training in the skill improved their ability to self-judge, judge others, and at the skill itself.
People, therefore, are unfit to judge their own competence; the only reliable way to get feedback is via actual practice (i.e. if you have some sort of independent metric for your ability, such as success or failure of actual work) or if you have other competent people judge your competence. As you might imagine, this, of course, creates the problem where you have to ask yourself, "Who is actually competent in cryonics?" And the answer is "cryobiologists and people in related disciplines". And what is THEIR opinion of cyronics?
Quite poor, on the whole. While there are "cryonics specialists" there are no signs of actual competence there as there is no one who can actually revive frozen people, let alone revive frozen people and fix whatever problems they had prior to being frozen. Ergo, they can't really be viewed as useful judges on the whole because they have shown no signs of actual competence - there is no proof that anyone is competent at cryonics at all.
Dunning-Kruger definitely applies here, and applies in a major way. The closest things to experts are the people working in real scientific disciplines, such as cyrobiology and similar things. These people have real expertise, and they are not exactly best friends with Alcor and similar organizations. In fact, most of them say that it is, at best, well-intended stupidity and at worst a scam.
Name three. Like V_V, I suspect that for all that you glibly allude to 'cults' you have no personal experience and you have not acquainted yourself with even a surface summary of the literature, much like you have not bothered to so much as read a cryonics FAQ or book before thinking you have refuted it.
Similar religious movements? How many movements don't have some concept of life after death? It is very analogous.
I have indeed read papers on cyrobiology and on cryonics, though I could not name them off-hand - indeed, I couldn't tell you the name of the paper I read on the subject just yesterday, or the others I read earlier this week. I am, on the whole, not very impressed. There are definitely things we can freeze and thaw just fine - embryos and sperm, for instance. We can freeze lots of "lower organisms". We've played around with freezing fish and frogs and various creatures which have adapted to such things.
But freezing mammals? Even reducing mammalian body temperatures to the point where freezing begins is fatal, albeit not immediately; we have revived rats and monkeys and hamsters down to very low temperatures (below 0C) and revived them, but they don't tend to do very well afterwards, dying on the scale of hours to days. Some organs, such as the heart and kidney, have been frozen and revived - which is cool, to be fair. Well, frozen is the wrong term really - more "preserved at low temperatures". There was the rabbit kidney which they did vitrify, while the hearts I've seen have mostly been reduced to low temperatures without freezing them - though you can apparently freeze and thaw hearts and they'll work, at least for a while (we figured that out more than half a century ago).
However, a lot of cryobiology is not about things applicable to cryonics - we're talking taking tissue down to like, -2C, not immersing it in LN2. The vitrified rabbit kidney is interesting for that reason, but unfortunately the rabbit in question only lasted nine days - so while it could keep them up for a while, it did eventually fail. And all the other rabbits they experimented on perished as well.
And it takes even less time to notice that there are long thorough answers to the obvious objections. Your point here is true, but says far more about you than religion or cryonics; after all, many true things like heliocentrism or evolution have superficial easily thought-of objections which have been addressed in depth. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't; the argument from evil is probably the single most obvious argument against Western religions, there are countless replies from theists of various levels of sophistication, and while I don't think any of them actually work, I also don't think someone going 'My mother died! God doesn't exist!' is contributing anything whatsoever. What, you think the theists somehow failed to notice that bad things happen? Of course they did notice, so if you want to argue against the existence of God, read up on their response.
The length of an answer has very little to do with its value. Look at Alcor's many answers - there are plenty of long answers there. Long on hope, that is, short on reality. In fact, being able to answer something succicently is often a sign of actual thought. It is very simple to pontificate and pretend you have a point, it is much more difficult to write a one paragraph answer that is complete. And in this case, the answer SHOULD be simple.
If it was so easy, again, why are you writing a long response?
If you had spent less time being arrogant, it might have occurred to you that I see this sort of flip reaction all the time in which people learn of cryonics and in five seconds think they've come up with the perfect objection and refuse to spend any time at all to disconfirm their objection. You are acting exactly like the person who said, "but it's not profitable to revive crypatients! QED you're all idiots and suckers", when literally the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article on ALCOR implies how they attempt to resolve this issue; here's a link to the discussion: http://lesswrong.com/lw/gh5/cryo_and_social_obligations/8d43
I enjoy how you are calling me arrogant, and yet you still are not answering my question.
At least other people have tried. "Dead people are valuable artifacts! People are excited about Jurassic park, that would totally be a viable business venture, so why not dead people?" Now that is a quick, succicient argument. It makes a reasonable appeal - dead people could be valuable as an attraction in the future.
The problem with that is the idea that it would make you any money at all. The Thirteenth Amendment prohibits owning people, and that kind of puts a major crimp in the idea of a tourist attraction, and given the sheer expense involved, again, you need some sort of parallel technology to get rid of those costs in any case. Humans are also a lot less exciting than dinosaurs are. I'm not going to go to the zoo to see someone from the 17th century, and indeed the idea is morally repugnant. Sure, I might go to ren faires, but let's face it - ren faires aren't run by people from the 10th century, they're run by people from the 21st century for people from the 21st century.
You are comparing the current state of the art (freezing mammals and rabbits) with what may or may not be theoretically possible, potentially centuries down the line.
How long a rabbit survived upon being revived using current methods is besides the point - how long rabbits (and humans) can possibly survive when revived a long time into the future would be more relevant. Potentially no survival would be necessary at all, if the informational state was uploaded to a different hardware substrate. Not postulating magic, just not postulating anything which woul...
For so long as I can remember, I have rejected Pascal's Wager in all its forms on sheerly practical grounds: anyone who tries to plan out their life by chasing a 1 in 10,000 chance of a huge payoff is almost certainly doomed in practice. This kind of clever reasoning never pays off in real life...
...unless you have also underestimated the allegedly tiny chance of the large impact.
For example. At one critical junction in history, Leo Szilard, the first physicist to see the possibility of fission chain reactions and hence practical nuclear weapons, was trying to persuade Enrico Fermi to take the issue seriously, in the company of a more prestigious friend, Isidor Rabi:
I said to him: "Did you talk to Fermi?" Rabi said, "Yes, I did." I said, "What did Fermi say?" Rabi said, "Fermi said 'Nuts!'" So I said, "Why did he say 'Nuts!'?" and Rabi said, "Well, I don't know, but he is in and we can ask him." So we went over to Fermi's office, and Rabi said to Fermi, "Look, Fermi, I told you what Szilard thought and you said ‘Nuts!' and Szilard wants to know why you said ‘Nuts!'" So Fermi said, "Well… there is the remote possibility that neutrons may be emitted in the fission of uranium and then of course perhaps a chain reaction can be made." Rabi said, "What do you mean by ‘remote possibility'?" and Fermi said, "Well, ten per cent." Rabi said, "Ten per cent is not a remote possibility if it means that we may die of it. If I have pneumonia and the doctor tells me that there is a remote possibility that I might die, and it's ten percent, I get excited about it." (Quoted in 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb' by Richard Rhodes.)
This might look at first like a successful application of "multiplying a low probability by a high impact", but I would reject that this was really going on. Where the heck did Fermi get that 10% figure for his 'remote possibility', especially considering that fission chain reactions did in fact turn out to be possible? If some sort of reasoning had told us that a fission chain reaction was improbable, then after it turned out to be reality, good procedure would have us go back and check our reasoning to see what went wrong, and figure out how to adjust our way of thinking so as to not make the same mistake again. So far as I know, there was no physical reason whatsoever to think a fission chain reaction was only a ten percent probability. They had not been demonstrated experimentally, to be sure; but they were still the default projection from what was already known. If you'd been told in the 1930s that fission chain reactions were impossible, you would've been told something that implied new physical facts unknown to current science (and indeed, no such facts existed). After reading enough historical instances of famous scientists dismissing things as impossible when there was no physical logic to say that it was even improbable, one cynically suspects that some prestigious scientists perhaps came to conceive of themselves as senior people who ought to be skeptical about things, and that Fermi was just reacting emotionally. The lesson I draw from this historical case is not that it's a good idea to go around multiplying ten percent probabilities by large impacts, but that Fermi should not have pulled out a number as low as ten percent.
Having seen enough conversations involving made-up probabilities to become cynical, I also strongly suspect that if Fermi had foreseen how Rabi would reply, Fermi would've said "One percent". If Fermi had expected Rabi to say "One percent is not small if..." then Fermi would've said "One in ten thousand" or "Too small to consider" - whatever he thought would get him off the hook. Perhaps I am being too unkind to Fermi, who was a famously great estimator; Fermi may well have performed some sort of lawful probability estimate on the spot. But Fermi is also the one who said that nuclear energy was fifty years off in the unlikely event it could be done at all, two years (IIRC) before Fermi himself oversaw the construction of the first nuclear pile. Where did Fermi get that fifty-year number from? This sort of thing does make me more likely to believe that Fermi, in playing the role of the solemn doubter, was just Making Things Up; and this is no less a sin when you make up skeptical things. And if this cynicism is right, then we cannot learn the lesson that it is wise to multiply small probabilities by large impacts because this is what saved Fermi - if Fermi had known the rule, if he had seen it coming, he would have just Made Up an even smaller probability to get himself off the hook. It would have been so very easy and convenient to say, "One in ten thousand, there's no experimental proof and most ideas like that are wrong! Think of all the conjunctive probabilities that have to be true before we actually get nuclear weapons and our own efforts actually made a difference in that!" followed shortly by "But it's not practical to be worried about such tiny probabilities!" Or maybe Fermi would've known better, but even so I have never been a fan of trying to have two mistakes cancel each other out.
I mention all this because it is dangerous to be half a rationalist, and only stop making one of the two mistakes. If you are going to reject impractical 'clever arguments' that would never work in real life, and henceforth not try to multiply tiny probabilities by huge payoffs, then you had also better reject all the clever arguments that would've led Fermi or Szilard to assign probabilities much smaller than ten percent. (Listing out a group of conjunctive probabilities leading up to taking an important action, and not listing any disjunctive probabilities, is one widely popular way of driving down the apparent probability of just about anything.) Or if you would've tried to put fission chain reactions into a reference class of 'amazing new energy sources' and then assigned it a tiny probability, or put Szilard into the reference class of 'people who think the fate of the world depends on them', or pontificated about the lack of any positive experimental evidence proving that a chain reaction was possible, blah blah blah etcetera - then your error here can perhaps be compensated for by the opposite error of then trying to multiply the resulting tiny probability by a large impact. I don't like making clever mistakes that cancel each other out - I consider that idea to also be clever - but making clever mistakes that don't cancel out is worse.
On the other hand, if you want a general heuristic that could've led Fermi to do better, I would suggest reasoning that previous-historical experimental proof of a chain reaction would not be strongly be expected even in worlds where it was possible, and that to discover a chain reaction to be impossible would imply learning some new fact of physical science which was not already known. And this is not just 20-20 hindsight; Szilard and Rabi saw the logic in advance of the fact, not just afterward - though not in those exact terms; they just saw the physical logic, and then didn't adjust it downward for 'absurdity' or with more complicated rationalizations. But then if you are going to take this sort of reasoning at face value, without adjusting it downward, then it's probably not a good idea to panic every time you assign a 0.01% probability to something big - you'll probably run into dozens of things like that, at least, and panicking over them would leave no room to wait until you found something whose face-value probability was large.
I don't believe in multiplying tiny probabilities by huge impacts. But I also believe that Fermi could have done better than saying ten percent, and that it wasn't just random luck mixed with overconfidence that led Szilard and Rabi to assign higher probabilities than that. Or to name a modern issue which is still open, Michael Shermer should not have dismissed the possibility of molecular nanotechnology, and Eric Drexler will not have been randomly lucky when it turns out to work: taking current physical models at face value imply that molecular nanotechnology ought to work, and if it doesn't work we've learned some new fact unknown to present physics, etcetera. Taking the physical logic at face value is fine, and there's no need to adjust it downward for any particular reason; if you say that Eric Drexler should 'adjust' this probability downward for whatever reason, then I think you're giving him rules that predictably give him the wrong answer. Sometimes surface appearances are misleading, but most of the time they're not.
A key test I apply to any supposed rule of reasoning about high-impact scenarios is, "Does this rule screw over the planet if Reality actually hands us a high-impact scenario?" and if the answer is yes, I discard it and move on. The point of rationality is to figure out which world we actually live in and adapt accordingly, not to rule out certain sorts of worlds in advance.
There's a doubly-clever form of the argument wherein everyone in a plausibly high-impact position modestly attributes only a tiny potential possibility that their face-value view of the world is sane, and then they multiply this tiny probability by the large impact, and so they act anyway and on average worlds in trouble are saved. I don't think this works in real life - I don't think I would have wanted Leo Szilard to think like that. I think that if your brain really actually thinks that fission chain reactions have only a tiny probability of being important, you will go off and try to invent better refrigerators or something else that might make you money. And if your brain does not really feel that fission chain reactions have a tiny probability, then your beliefs and aliefs are out of sync and that is not something I want to see in people trying to handle the delicate issue of nuclear weapons. But in any case, I deny the original premise: I do not think the world's niches for heroism must be populated by heroes who are incapable in principle of reasonably distinguishing themselves from a population of crackpots, all of whom have no choice but to continue on the tiny off-chance that they are not crackpots.
I haven't written enough about what I've begun thinking of as 'heroic epistemology' - why, how can you possibly be so overconfident as to dare even try to have a huge positive impact when most people in that reference class blah blah blah - but on reflection, it seems to me that an awful lot of my answer boils down to not trying to be clever about it. I don't multiply tiny probabilities by huge impacts. I also don't get tiny probabilities by putting myself into inescapable reference classes, for this is the sort of reasoning that would screw over planets that actually were in trouble if everyone thought like that. In the course of any workday, on the now very rare occasions I find myself thinking about such meta-level junk instead of the math at hand, I remind myself that it is a wasted motion - where a 'wasted motion' is any thought which will, in retrospect if the problem is in fact solved, not have contributed to having solved the problem. If someday Friendly AI is built, will it have been terribly important that someone have spent a month fretting about what reference class they're in? No. Will it, in retrospect, have been an important step along the pathway to understanding stable self-modification, if we spend time trying to solve the Lobian obstacle? Possibly. So one of these cognitive avenues is predictably a wasted motion in retrospect, and one of them is not. The same would hold if I spent a lot of time trying to convince myself that I was allowed to believe that I could affect anything large, or any other form of angsting about meta. It is predictable that in retrospect I will think this was a waste of time compared to working on a trust criterion between a probability distribution and an improved probability distribution. (Apologies, this is a technical thingy I'm currently working on which has no good English description.)
But if you must apply clever adjustments to things, then for Belldandy's sake don't be one-sidedly clever and have all your cleverness be on the side of arguments for inaction. I think you're better off without all the complicated fretting - but you're definitely not better off eliminating only half of it.
And finally, I once again state that I abjure, refute, and disclaim all forms of Pascalian reasoning and multiplying tiny probabilities by large impacts when it comes to existential risk. We live on a planet with upcoming prospects of, among other things, human intelligence enhancement, molecular nanotechnology, sufficiently advanced biotechnology, brain-computer interfaces, and of course Artificial Intelligence in several guises. If something has only a tiny chance of impacting the fate of the world, there should be something with a larger probability of an equally huge impact to worry about instead. You cannot justifiably trade off tiny probabilities of x-risk improvement against efforts that do not effectuate a happy intergalactic civilization, but there is nonetheless no need to go on tracking tiny probabilities when you'd expect there to be medium-sized probabilities of x-risk reduction. Nonetheless I try to avoid coming up with clever reasons to do stupid things, and one example of a stupid thing would be not working on Friendly AI when it's in blatant need of work. Elaborate complicated reasoning which says we should let the Friendly AI issue just stay on fire and burn merrily away, well, any complicated reasoning which returns an output this silly is automatically suspect.
If, however, you are unlucky enough to have been cleverly argued into obeying rules that make it a priori unreachable-in-practice for anyone to end up in an epistemic state where they try to do something about a planet which appears to be on fire - so that there are no more plausible x-risk reduction efforts to fall back on, because you're adjusting all the high-impact probabilities downward from what the surface state of the world suggests...
Well, that would only be a good idea if Reality were not allowed to hand you a planet that was in fact on fire. Or if, given a planet on fire, Reality was prohibited from handing you a chance to put it out. There is no reason to think that Reality must a priori obey such a constraint.
EDIT: To clarify, "Don't multiply tiny probabilities by large impacts" is something that I apply to large-scale projects and lines of historical probability. On a very large scale, if you think FAI stands a serious chance of saving the world, then humanity should dump a bunch of effort into it, and if nobody's dumping effort into it then you should dump more effort than currently into it. On a smaller scale, to compare two x-risk mitigation projects in demand of money, you need to estimate something about marginal impacts of the next added effort (where the common currency of utilons should probably not be lives saved, but "probability of an ok outcome", i.e., the probability of ending up with a happy intergalactic civilization). In this case the average marginal added dollar can only account for a very tiny slice of probability, but this is not Pascal's Wager. Large efforts with a success-or-failure criterion are rightly, justly, and unavoidably going to end up with small marginally increased probabilities of success per added small unit of effort. It would only be Pascal's Wager if the whole route-to-an-OK-outcome were assigned a tiny probability, and then a large payoff used to shut down further discussion of whether the next unit of effort should go there or to a different x-risk.