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The cryopreservation of bad people
This month's media thread includes a short article on some people's idea to have Ayn Rand frozen, which ultimately didn't happen. My first reaction was a shudder. I thought, I definitely wouldn't want Ayn Rand preserved forever. My second thought was, What right do I have to say who can and who can't get frozen?
Whatever your thoughts on Ayn Rand, I think this can spark an interesting conversation: What, if anything, should humankind do about people who are widely seen as harmful for the whole? For example, if the Castro dynasty in Cuba or the Kim dynasty in North Korea decide to freeze themselves to ensure they will continue oppressing their countries forever, should that be prevented? (And yes, my opinion of Ayn Rand is such that these examples came to mind.)
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Comments (76)
1) Does someone deserve the death penalty for advocating capitalism/bad philosophy/writing boring novels/whatever you think Ayn Rand is guilty of?
2) How would Cryogenics increase the longevity of the Kim dynasty? Either the Kim dynasty is still in charge when revival is possible, in which case you only change which Kim is in charge by reviving an earlier one, or they're not, in which case, why would the revived Kim be put back in charge?
1) Depends on whether you draw an ethical distinction between causing to happen and letting happen. Since I am strongly against death penalty, I would have to defend the cryopreservation of terrible people if it were established that not freezing = actively killing.
2) North Korean law says that Grandpa Kim is the eternal ruler of the country. That corpse is beyond recovery now, but they may want to keep the current Kim in store if they want to follow the spirit of the law.
North Korea doesn't have a functioning rule of law. Treating it that way produces bad intuitions about how North Korea works.
This does not contradict /u/polymathwannabe's claim. Was it intended to?
polymathwannabe treats law as being important. The question isn't "What does the law say" but does anybody currently in a position of power in North Korea benefits from bringing him back and would be therefore motivated to bring him back.
That is true. But maybe the law itself doesn't have to command respect to be a predictor of compliance. For example, given that the law stipulates Kim's eternal presidency, we can infer that a Kim is in power. From this we can infer that the DPRK government would want to preserve Kim.
No. "In power" is a pretty relative term. By North Korea own admission there were times when secret services of the nation did whatever they wanted without input from their leader.
From what we know about the current Kim, he was an introvert ten years ago when he went to school in Switzerland. Current power structures in North Korea are very opaque.
I think that without a functioning rule of law, you cannot say that the law about Kim being eternal ruler will have any particular effect and so wouldn't necessarily lead to his being thawed and reinstated. Not being bound in any way by the law refutes the part of polymathwannabe's conclusion about what would happen "if they want to follow the spirit of the law."
Yes, I see what you are saying. But if we interpret /u/polymathwannabe a little more charitably, we might steelman the claim thus:
This interpretation focuses less on the law, but it still gets /u/polymathwannabe's point across.
1) I think it rather depends on whether you are simply not going out of your way to freeze terrible people, or whether you are actively trying to prevent their freezing.
2) Still don't see how current Kim rules in the future is any different from future Kim rules in the future Kim rules in the future. Also if North Korea is invaded by the UN/an FAI/whatever the dominant military power of the future is, then the invaders won't give a damn about North Korean laws.
Upvoted for the interesting question, then revoked the upvote for unnecessary mindkill-bait.
...but it's still an interesting question. It actually came to mind recently when someone I know and loathe died, and for a moment I thought "hrm. If cryonics was a widespread Thing, he would be less dead, and that would be bad."
It didn't take long to spot the obvious flaw: I'd trade the survival of people I don't like for the survival of people I do in a heartbeat, so the benefits of cryonics as a whole (in the hypothetical world where it works, which I'm not convinced of) still outweigh the drawbacks of bad people getting preserved. That's just the easy question, though. Working out whether it's OK to say "hey, even if cyronics becomes near-universal, specific individuals should not be preserved" is harder. If you believe permitting someone's death by inaction is morally equivalent to killing them, then the question reduces to the capital-punishment question. If you do not so believe...then I'm not sure.
I'd like to know how to get from that position to something more like:
"I want the secret of the Dark Lord's immortality in order to use it for everyone! " (HPMoR)
Firstly, your comparison of Ayn Rand, a deceased novelist, to multi-decade tyrannical dynasties, is more than a little unhinged.
Secondly, the way that people act is strongly influenced by their surroundings, institutions, and social context. To think otherwise is the Fundamental Attribution Error. Castro and Kim don't have some special quality that would make them totalitarian dictators in the future; it's the nature of Cuban and Korean social institutions that have put them where they are. In a not-so-very-different world, Bashar Al-Assad would be an ophthalmologist in Acton. If future institutions are sufficiently inadequate, there will be plenty of would-be tyrants without worrying about a few cryopreserved relics being some sort of tipping point.
Thirdly, I suppose it depends on your view of mankind. There is no realistic way you can control whether people who are cryopreserved (or born) will be "good" or "bad" on net. So will, on average, more people lead to better outcomes? Or are human beings some kind of virus?
From my book Singularity Rising:
Communist dictator Joseph Stalin maintained power through killing millions of his countrymen and terrorizing the rest. He often lashed out at his old comrades, sometimes killing them and their families; other times he was satisfied with just jailing their wives. Stalin, who was denounced shortly after his death by his successor Nikita Khrushchev, must have known how hated he was. But the dictator knew that those who hated him were too weak or fearful to hurt him.
The first cryonics patient was preserved in 1967, fourteen years after Stalin’s death. But what if, I wonder, cryonics existed during the time of Stalin, and the dictator hoped to have himself preserved? Stalin was too smart to think his successors would have ever wanted him back. So if, at the beginning of his rule, Stalin had hoped to someday use cryonics, he would have had to be a less ruthless ruler. To have any hope at cryogenic revival, the world will need to want you back. So if the world’s leaders intend to use cryonics, they will have to care more about what the future will think of them.
Apparently quite a number of people in the former Soviet Union want Stalin back:
http://carnegieendowment.org/2013/03/01/stalin-puzzle-deciphering-post-soviet-public-opinion
Stalin was almost universally loved and worshiped among the not-yet-jailed population. [EDIT: "almost universally" is stronger than necessary to make might point. The real numbers are not known and hard to come by. "A majority" would probably be a safe estimate.] But you do have a point that after his death it could have unraveled, though not necessarily so. Mao is still venerated in China, and Kim Il Sung in NK. Besides, narcissists are skilled in convincing themselves that everyone loves them, except for bad people. So I don't think your argument that
has no basis in fact.
I doubt Stalin would have been as ruthless as far as killing people go if he wouldn't have a general distrust of other people.
Heh. Those Russians just aren't ready for a Western style democracy, they love their Tsar. So the trope goes. It's still going, sadly.
<looks at Putin's ratings> I see empirical support for that proposition :-/
Way to strawman. I only stated a well-known and documented historical fact.
Well-known, sure, documented, not so sure. How reliable, do you think, are estimates of true attitudes towards Stalin in a society where you were required to display adoration at the pain of being sent to Gulag or just executed? People who didn't like Stalin applauded with everyone else and never ever mentioned their dislike to anyone.
I do not have reliable sources handy, but the widespread unfeigned mourning of his passing in 1953 seems to hint at genuine feelings.
I do not doubt that some large percentage of the population did love and worship Stalin. But the "almost universally" might or might not be true -- my point is that the degree to which he was genuinely loved is very uncertain and that uncertainty is not widely recognized.
What you stated is your view of Russians as "the Other." People are everywhere the same, and while the way people react to a complete totalitarian takeover of society is a very interest subject, your view of what happens in such a society is very shallow and a little sad. I pray you will have never have to live in such a society yourself to experience what happens first hand.
You can try to read between Bulgakov's lines to understand what people who can put two and two together might have thought at the time. And he was just the one who had the courage to write, most wrote nothing.
[ edit: I did not downvote. ]
Huh? Where did you get that from?
Yes and no. Biologically they are very similar on average. Culturally they end up very different. Hopefully you are not arguing with this empirical fact.
Quite so. I suspect that having grown up in a society grown from an absolute monarchy would make another takeover easier, but I do not have any research handy to back it up, so it's just a suspicion. Certainly Chile recovered nicely after Pinochet. And Ho Chi Minh is still venerated in Vietnam, 55 years after his death.
You don't know what my views are, you are lamenting your strawmanning of them.
And now you are also making rather unwarranted assumptions about my life experiences.
Of course, there were people who saw through the propaganda and brainwashing. Unfortunately, they were a tiny minority. Most were scared, blamed some low-level bureaucrat for certain failures, but adored the guy at the top.
Indeed, most of those who saw through the con were too scared to put anything on paper, and for a good reason. And many of those who did probably got disappeared without a trace, so we don't know about them. Which does not invalidate my original point that an average person loved and worshipped Stalin.
I guess I have nothing to add, other than suggest you read about Russian history from about 1812 to about 1939. Or maybe talk to some folks who lived through Stalin years, if you can find any still alive.
Very disappointing.
While I respect your expertise in comp sci and math, you have much to learn about rational discourse. I suppose this will be the last we talk on LW.
No they aren't. And even if you argue that people are biologically the same, they are very clearly different culturally and culture matters.
This is plain not true, the level of his popular support (not "love and worship") is disputed, but at the "more than half" vs "less than half" level.
But I kind of agree with your conclusion.
Yeah, I don't see the firm stats on the issue. My online search was not very fruitful, either. Judging by the reaction to Stalin's death, the number is definitely at the "more than half" level, but I can't tell much more than that. If you have any relevant links, please feel free to post them. And yeah, my unnecessarily strong statement detracted from the point I was trying to make.
If we can take cryonicist Jerry Leaf's account at face value, he assassinated people for the U.S. Government in Southeast Asia in the early 1960's. I got to meet Jerry two or three times and exchanged some small talk with him before he went into cryo in 1991, so I don't claim I knew him or anything beyond that. As I recall, he had some kind of military rifle on display in Alcor's facility in Riverside, CA.
http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/Interview-JerryLeaf.html
Now, if Leaf had actually killed people with his own hands, does that fact make him a "bad person" who didn't deserve to go into cryo?
I don't think a frozen corpse is going to oppress anyone, much less whole countries forever.
Ayn Rand Derangement Syndrome just never gets old.
Human Life Good. It is a fault in the system that bad people can harm others. Frozen people harm nothing. Don't bring them back until Master Control protects all from all.
My visceral reaction was that "bad people" shouldn't be preserved. A second take relaxed that position quite a bit: the potential gain from cryonic preservation is massive (imagine living for hundreds of thousands of years). This makes death extremely costly (in comparison to a more conventional view of the human lifespan as more-or-less capped at 120 years). As such, denying cryonic preservation to anyone is an extremely unfriendly action.
That said, cryonic preservation is a costly venture. In the unlikely event that humanity were in dire straights and needed to devise a list of preserved humans to be sacrificed (for energy costs, space constraints, or whatever) in order to maintain the safety of others in the population, I'm entirely comfortable with considering a person's "badness" as a factor in the decision of whether or not to jettison them.
So, as a thought experiment, imagine that through elven magic you get to resurrect some (but not all) people from, say, XVI-century Europe. What you have is a bunch of coffins and some of them are marked "Bad person" and some are marked "Good person" -- by people who buried them 500 years ago. Are you going to take these markings into account?
Would you answer differently if the coffins came from Pharaonic Egypt? An unnamed Neolithic village?
Also, if the "bad person" is an enemy leader in a war this raises other issues, like whether it is considered military aid if anti-war activists in the US resurrect Osama bin Laden to make a point (or if they just resurrect enemy soldiers and let those soldiers go home to make war on the US).
It depends on how much I trust the judgment that so-and-so is a bad person. Obviously, most of us won't trust the judgment of a 16th century coffin scribbler much, if for no other reason than because this person doesn't share our values. Even if they wrote "this person is bad because he committed murder" and "this person is bad because he's a Jew", that would only let me discard the judgments that obviously have mismatches with my values, but not let me discard the judgments with more subtle mismatches (such as whether he thinks it's murder for a peasant to use self-defense against a lord).
If we're discussing society-wide policy on resurrections, then I need to decide how I trust the judgment of the people in society who do resurrections as well as the judgment of the people who inscribed the coffins. I wouldn't trust those people's judgment except in extreme cases, like for someone who committed a serious violent crime and was convicted of it through a reasonably fair process.
In the case of people who couldn't be convicted, either because they died before trial, or because they are a world leader who could not be put on trial, I think I would require some process that ensures that this doesn't randomly get applied to anyone who is disliked. Otherwise, saying you can't resurrect Hitler opens the door to saying "Israel is committing genocide on the Palestinians, resurrecting any dead Israeli leader is like resurrecting Hitler".
Given the choice between resurrecting Hitler and resurrecting and random cryonically person, who would you choose? There may be compelling reasons to choose Hitler-maybe we are in need of some information which Hitler knew-but the probability that the random person was more bad than Hitler is extremely low, a proposition I can make in the absence of a rigid definition of badness. Nevertheless, this is an edge case-I would need a very compelling case about preservation of resources to even consider the question of who we should save, much less advocate preserving one person over another.
I think any society advanced enough to do cryonical revival won't have to do random resurrections. They can analyse the bodies.
Information can be lost across generations. I know this is fictional evidence, but the "unfreezing Khan" scenario is a possibility.
I don't know excatly to what "unfreezing Khan" scenario refers.
A body itself has to hold information to be revived.
The Enterprise crew revived Khan without knowing he had been a war criminal in the past. The historical records on that war were incomplete and could have given them no warning of who they were reviving.
(deleted)
Historical records on nearly any war are incomplete. War crimes of the winning side are seldomly documented well.
Why do you think the having been a war criminal in the past is good evidence that an individual would cause harm? It's very unlikely that an individual who get's revived is in a position to get a lot of political power.
If I'm interpreting correctly Lumifer's intention with the thought experiment, then we shouldn't expect future societies to pay any attention to our judgment of who was a good person and who wasn't. By freezing ourselves we'd be basically jumping into the terrifying unknown.
You could probably make an argument to not thaw people who are still considered bad by the people doing the thawing. If you don't have a lasting legacy then people of your time didn't really consider you bad enough to worry about for the future.
There are two ways such an argument could go. One is that not-thawing is punishment. He was a bad guy and wasn't punished enough during his lifetime, so now we will punish him more by not thawing him. That argument, as you imagine, has some problems.
The other way is to say that this guy is a danger (or, more generally, a net negative) to the current society. But there are problems here, too. Let's take everyone's favourite -- Hitler. Is he really a danger to the society, say, a couple hundred years from now? Or maybe, given the lack of very unhappy Germany, he'll settle down in some pastoral village, make speeches to the walls of his cottage and work on improving his art?
The question isn't as easy as it looks.
I can think of two situations where you might want to do this:
Followed by cryopreservation?? 8-0
You notice I made no effort to define or operationalize "badness"? The scenario in which the "bad" people aren't reanimated is an edge case, a concession to the fact that some people are generally agreed to be "bad", but a consistent and widely agreeable definition of badness is difficult to get right. I don't know what it is, but If anyone does, I'm all ears!
Yes, but the point is that people who characterize somebody as "bad" or "good" and people who decide which bodies to jettison are different people who don't necessarily share a vocabulary, never mind a common value system.
If you don't define "bad", then I don't understand what does this mean:
I disagree. If you are the decision-maker and your decision algorithm includes "badness", its your responsibility to define (and calculate) "badness", based on the data available to you. This is key.
It seems to me that this whole scenario is roughly analogous to the Trolley Problem, with the twist that the decision-maker is given unknown access to unknown amounts of data about the people who will live or die. In a situation of minimal information (imagine caskets identified by a randomly-assigned ID, archived by a database which had long-since been lost), the decision-maker must choose the survivor based only on the information stored within the body (e.g. DNA, presence of extant uncured diseases, etc.). Given more information (such as Jiro's caskets), the decision-maker must choose based on the combination of the information within the body and the information attached to it.
So, you must kill m people in order to preserve at least m+1 people, and you have n people from which to choose. How would you do it?
So, what data would you use and how?
That's interesting. So the value of the person is entirely in his/her usefulness to the society?
Well, the problem we are discussing assumes that you do NOT have access to much data (certainly not their rap sheet or the lack thereof) about the frozen people -- their name and whether their contemporaries thought them "good" or "bad" is all you have.
In fact, the core of the issue is whether you are willing to accept moral judgements from another time and culture to the extent of making life-and-death decisions on that basis.
Not entirely. But it certainly trumps a person's "badness" in my opinion.
If the civilization reawakening them is capable of calculating an Expected Value for each person based only on their DNA (and other information contained in the body, such as irreversible injuries) which is more accurate than moral differences between the society which froze them and the society which may awaken them, then the moral judgements of the originating society are probably useless.
By the standards of the most likely futures able to wake the corpsicles, we will all have been barbarians. Some remedial education is likely to be visited on the risen, but not freezing people really isn't okay for anything short of capital crimes, and even then I'd rather have them in the freezer, so that if the future thinks better of it they can fix it.
I think that future morality would be different enough from current morality by the time it becomes possible to reawaken/resurrect/[please tell me what the LW term of choice is] cryonics patients such that cryonics patients in general would be regarded as less likely to be moral than people born in the future. Any future capable of bringing back cryonics patients would be highly likely to prevent crime in the cryonic population, and not let the Kim dynasty harm any future victims.
The main consequentialist reason to punish crimes is to prevent future crimes. Refusing to cryopreserve people who do bad things would be a poor deterrent, as most people display little interest in cryonics. Cryopreserving people who do bad things would be unlikely to increase the harm they could do, because the future could presumably refuse to bring back any patients who they saw as a threat until they knew how to mitigate that risk.