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Alicorn comments on Suspended Animation Inc. accused of incompetence - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (127)
If CI were trying to just look good wouldn't they hire someone to make their website better?
I think you mean "If CI were competent and trying to just look good, wouldn't they hire someone to make their website better?" When you add that unspoken assumption, the answer shifts quite a bit.
It also seems that if the money is primarily coming from on high, rather than from customers, having a slicker website wouldn't make a difference- the wealthy funders don't care.
If your argument is "if they were trying to look good, they'd just make their website better," then I disagree for two reasons:
1) There is a lot more to looking credible then just having a fancy website. The most important thing is that CI's target audience believes that CI provides high-quality care; as Melody explains, Alcor and others are very good at making their services and their staff appear more competent than they actually are.
2) They actually explain why the site looks the way it is on their FAQ page:
Fixing their website seems like it would be low-hanging fruit on projecting credibility. It might not be optimally targeted at the sort of credibility they want to optimize for, but it would still be quite efficient.
The FAQ doesn't explain why the site looks the way it does. Their site is difficult to navigate and ugly, and both problems could be solved without making it bulky or complicated. I could design a better website than that, and I'm not even good at designing websites.
True, but it also occurs to me that making one's website look good is not a real test of credibility because CI would want to make their website appealing regardless of whether their services and staff are competent or not. That is, P(website looks good|CI is competent) = P(website looks good|not competent) and P(website not good|CI is competent) = P(website not good|not competent).
I'm inclined to agree that there could be ways to make the site look better, but given their explanation (the one I quoted above), perhaps they don't realize this.
FWI, I'm considering cryonics and one thing that has set off warning bells is how bad the CI and Alcor websites are (CI is much worse of the two).
If you do sign up, your next job is to help fix the many organisational and publicity problems cryonics has, let alone the technological ones. Cryoptimism (1 2) is an antipattern.
Cryonics deeply needs strong advocates who apply scepticism to it. I'd love cryonics to work, both technologically and organisationally. At present it does neither. I think it really needs the second even before the first, as the second is achievable right now.
This is such a great comment over all that I'm not going to be pedantic about the pretense in "cryonics does not work technologically". Upvoted.
Well, it might preserve information. We don't actually know that it does. As far as I can find out (and I've looked), there is no evidence that the strength of neural network connections - and that's what your mind appears to be stored in - is actually preserved by current cryonics practice. (If you have something that directly addresses that specific question, I'd love to see it.)
And, of course, revival requires not only as-yet uninvented technology, but as-yet unrealised scientific breakthroughs, and the assumption that the scientific breakthroughs we would need will in fact work out the way we would need them to.
This is a profoundly slim chance to pin one’s hopes on, but it does not provably violate physics as we currently know it.
I'd love cryonics to work. I was actually neutral to positive on it before ciphergoth provoked me into investigating for the RW article. But there is no evidence as yet that current practice does or can, only that it might. I feel that being uncompromisingly realistic and rational about the prospects of it working is quite important to behaving sensibly concerning it.
Alcor says:
"It is a well-established fact that long-term memories are encoded in durable physical and chemical changes."
Usually the problem is not with freezing - but with thawing. Vitrification improves things further - but even without that an enormous quantity of information seems bound to be preserved. I don't think scepticism about this has much scientific basis. We know enough about the brain, and about freezing to see that a mountain of information will be preserved.
Also, check out the frozen frogs.
Are you saying we don't know that it preserves information at all?
I know of no evidence. Closest I know is the promising result that a percentage of pinewood nematodes (a favourite of cryobiology researchers, having about the simplest known nervous system that is definitely a nervous system) survive cryoprotectants and vitrification and, if they survive, go on to parasitise pinewoods much like they did before. (E. Riga and J. M. Webster. "Cryopreservation of the Pinewood Nematode, Bursaphelenchus spp." J. Nematol. 1991 October; 23 (4): 438–440.) Preserving a neural network is of course the holy grail. But this is getting way off topic for a blog about the art of human rationality.
This slowed me down too. (I'm now a CI member and I have my insurance policy, and I just need to do some more paperwork to let those two facts shake hands with each other, but the website made me feel like the entire process was going to be way more painful than it actually was).
CI is a different organization from SA. Suspended Animation has a much "nicer" website (i.e. looks more likely to have been professionally designed).