JoshuaZ comments on Open Thread, Apr. 20 - Apr. 26, 2015 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Gondolinian 20 April 2015 12:02AM

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Comment author: JoshuaZ 20 April 2015 09:41:51PM 11 points [-]

I don't think this is what is going here at all. The pattern match that is going on is cryonics and fringe science or pseudoscientific ideas that sound like they are promising things they cannot deliver. This much more about PZ thinking of himself as a skeptic and having just enough biology background to think he can comment on any biology related issue.

Comment author: satt 25 April 2015 02:07:35AM 1 point [-]

Yeah. The parent & sibling comments here got me curious about exactly what PZ wrote, and whether it'd be a transparently politically motivated fulmination against cryonicists.

But the post, as far as I can see, is just an unfavourable comparison of cryonics to ancient mummification, and Myers calling cryonicists frauds who practice "ritual" & "psuedo-scientific alteration of [a] corpse", frauds sometimes defended with "the transhumanist technofetishist version of Pascal’s Wager". Strong stuff, but I don't see anything in the post about partisan politics, race, nerd culture (unless one counts "transhumanist technofetishist" as a dog-whistle meant to slam nerds in general...?), or sexism or feminism or gender (well, except the reference to the frozen girl as a "girl").

Ctrl-F-ing for "Myers" doesn't reveal anything along those lines either.

I see several comments in the political categories I mentioned but they weren't posted by PZ or cheered by PZ, so I'm a bit surprised by the comments here focusing on PZ to impute political motives to him and psychoanalyze him.

PZ's post all but says he's slamming cryonicists because (to his mind) they're crooks & quacks. (Based on the reference to "tortur[ing] cadavers", maybe there's a purity-violation ick-reaction too. That's still pretty distant from the motivations people are speculating about here.) I don't understand why I'd need a special explanation for that, over & above the more common reasons why people tend to scoff at cryonics (absurdity heuristic, plus scepticism about future technological trends w.r.t. brain preservation & re-instantiation, plus over-generalization from everyday experience of how freezing affects food and the like).