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V_V 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.
Right. But the point is, who is in the wrong between the adopters and the non-adopters?
It can be argued that there was never good evidence to sign up for cryonics, therefore the adopters did it for irrational reasons.
If the new evidence which is in favor of cryonics benefits causes no increase in adoption, then either there is also new countervailing evidence or changes in cost or non-adopters are the more irrational side. Since I can't think of any body of new research or evidence which should neutralize the many pro-cryonics lines of research over the past several decades, and the costs have remained relatively constant in real terms, that tends to leave the third option.
(Alternatively, I could be wrong about whether non-adopters have updated towards cryonics; I wasn't around for the '60s or '70s, so maybe all the neuroscience and cryopreservation work really has made a dent and people in general are much more favorable towards cryonics than they used to be.)
No. If evidence is against cryonics, and it has always been this way, then the number of rational adopters should be approximately zero, thus approximately all the adopters should be the irrational ones.
As you say, the historical adoption rate seems to be independent of cryonics-related evidence, which supports the hypothesis that the adopters don't sign up because of an evidence-based rational decision process.
No. People have partial information and there are some who will have beliefs, experiences, or data which makes it rational for them to believe and also irrational reasons; additional rational reasons should push a few people over the edge of the decision if rational reasons play any meaningful role in non-adopters. (If you want to mathematicize it, imagine it as a liability-threshold model.)
Also no. I think you are not understanding my argument. Because all the new evidence is one-sided, we know the direction people should update in regardless of initial proportions of irrationality of either side. In the same way, we don't know for sure how irrational it was to believe in mind-body dualism in 1500 but we do know that all the evidence that has come in since has been decisively in favor of materialism, and if we saw a group which had the same rate of mind-body dualism in 2016 as 1500, we could be certain that they were deeply irrational on that topic. The absence of any change in the large initial fraction of non-adopters in response to all the new evidence over a long time period implies their judgement is far more driven by irrational reasons than adopters. (By definition everyone is either a adopter or non-adopter, no change in non-adopters implies no change in adopters.)
I have the sense that there's something wrong with this division into "adopters" and "non-adopters". The lack of increase in cryonics-adopters while pro-cryonics evidence has been coming in does not mean that there is one group that updates their cryonics decisions rationally (the adopters) and one group that does not (the non-adopters). If that were the case then there would be an increase, as the rational ones gradually got on board as evidence came in. The stasis in the adoption curve wouldn't just mean that the current non-adopters are irrational for not getting on board, it would also mean that the adopters were irrational for getting on board too soon, before the good evidence came in. Unless we want to say that from the get-go the pro-cryonics case was super strong.
I don't think it has to be super-strong. It just has to be reasonable. It was reasonable at the time, and as excuses get knocked down without any decrease in fraction of non-adopters, it becomes increasingly clear that they were not the real reason for the non-adopters and that they are non-adopters for pre-determined reasons which have little to do with the science.
You can replace "excuses" with "justifications" and "non-adopters" with "adopters" and get a similar argument in the other direction.
This amounts to Bulverism: if you assume that your opponents are wrong (i.e. you assume that their excuses got successfully knocked down), then you can claim there must be some irrationality that explains why they remain your opponents. But you're not supposed to assume that. It's like saying "excuses for opposing homeopathy get knocked down, but the allopaths don't become homeopaths. Obviously this shows they are alloapths for irrational reasons with nothing to do with the science".