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pangel comments on The Brain Preservation Foundation's Small Mammalian Brain Prize won - Less Wrong
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Probably not. If you look at the comments on posts about the Prize, you can see how clearly people have already set up their fallback arguments once the soldier of 'possible bad vitrification when scaled up to human brain size' has been knocked down. For example, on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11070528
Even if a human brain is stored, successfully scanned, and emulated, the continued existence - nay, majority - of body-identity theorists ensures that there will always be many people who have a bulletproof argument against: 'yeah, maybe there's a perfect copy, but it'll never really be you, it's only a copy waking up'.
More broadly, we can see that there is probably never going to be any 'Sputnik moment' for cryonics, because the adoption curve of paid-up members or cryopreservations is almost eerily linear over the past 50 years and entirely independent of the evidence. Refutation of 'exploding lysosomes' didn't produce any uptick. Long-term viability of ALCOR has not produced any uptick. Discoveries always pointing towards memory being a durable feature of neuronal connections rather than, as so often postulated, an evanescent dynamic property of electrical patterns, have never produced an uptick. Continued pushbacks of 'death' have not produced upticks. No improvement in scanning technology has produced an uptick. Moore's law proceeding for decades has produced no uptick. Revival of rabbit kidney, demonstration of long-term memory continuity in revived C. elegans, improvements in plastination and vitrification - all have not or are not producing any uptick. Adoption is not about evidence.
Even more broadly, if you could convince anyone, how many do you expect to take action? To make such long-term plans on abstract bases for the sake of the future? We live in a world where most people cannot save for retirement and cannot stop becoming obese and diabetic despite knowing full well the highly negative consequences, and where people who have survived near-fatal heart attacks are generally unable to take their medicines and exercise consistently as their doctors keep begging them. And for what? Life sucks, but at least then you get to die. Even after a revival, I would predict that maybe 5% of the USA population (~16m people) would be meaningfully interested in cryonics, and of that only a fraction would go through with it, so 'millions' is an upper bound.
Is this really good phrasing or did you manage to naturally think that way? If you do it automatically: I would like to do it too.
It often takes me a long time to recognize an argument war. Until that moment, I'm confused as to how anyone could be unfazed by new information X w.r.t. some topic. How do you detect you're not having a discussion but are walking on a battlefield?
Yes, I was referring to Eliezer's essay there. I liked my little flourish there, so I'm glad someone noticed.
In this case it's easy when you look over all the comments on HN and elsewhere. It's like when Yvain is simultaneously accused of being racist Neo-reactionary scum and a Marxist SJW beta-cuckold Jew scum - it's difficult to see how both sets of accusations could be right simultaneously, so clearly at least one set of accusers are unhinged.
Similarly, so the problem with this aldehyde-vitrification process is that it's both too good at fixing everything in place and it's not good enough at preserving information? It's a con job despite offering far greater transparency into whether it'll work? We know the process is quack science so it's a con job and oh, we already know the process works so it's a con job? It'll never work and we know this a priori because a copy of you isn't you? Each stroke against cryonics might seem reasonable or even probable on its own, but in total, like the 13th stroke of the clock which discredits all the previous ones' accuracy, they show what's really going on.