Discussion article for the meetup : First Brussels meetup

Discussion article for the meetup : First Brussels meetup

I'm currently trying to convince my parents to sign up for cryonics.

The problem is that they are completely opposed to the any form of life extension and/or immortality (and that’s without even mentioning something as "strange" as cryonics). Unfortunately, being their child, I have the intrinsic property that I can never know more about life then they do. The only thing they will believe are scientific studies from respectable scientists (a respectable scientist being someone who only says what they want to hear and is not me)

I have the arguments I gathered from Less Wrong and the Alcor Library. I’m focusing on my mother since my dad is impossible to convince without her support.
Her argument is that when you live for a very long time/forever wars are almost guaranteed to occur at least once in your lifetime and she doesn’t want to live through those. I asked her when, given that we could perfectly predict the future, we would know a war would break out tomorrow she would commit suicide today. Her answer was yes, as she couldn’t bear losing any of us and doesn’t want experience a war. I pointed out how I would feel if she died but she just dismissed the entire thing as crazy.   

My parents aren’t religious at all, so that’s one less bridge to cross but for all the rest I would greatly appreciate anything that might help convince them.

http://www.futerra.co.uk/downloads/Branding_Biodiversity.pdf

I'm quite interested in seeing if this works. I have sent this to several wildlife-guides and conservationists and will monitor their reactions.

It talks about what emotions drive people to actually do something to protect biodiversity rather then just showing them figures. After looking at what makes a certain brand successful they apply it on biodiversity. Their end conclusion is to remove messages based on extinction as it just makes people apathetic rather then inspire change. Furthermore they propose different ways of conveying "biodiversity is important" for different audiences. Love, fuzzy feelings and "you-can-make-a-difference!" for public changes and financial advantages and concrete action for policy changes. Lastly, the advise to make the message more personal by talking about loving your pets, focusing on local species and anthropomorphise whatever you are talking about.

In short they want to protect biodiversity by making it a brand name and getting people to buy their product (i.e. donate money, etc.)

The way I see it, altruism has been the big selling point for group selection. The only way altruism would have been able to evolve is through group selection, so the presence of altruism is strong evidence for the existence of group selection.

Group selectionists have been (rightly) criticized by pointing out that they were merely looking for an explanation that would fit the results they had already decided on and wrote the conclusion before looking for hypotheses. They wanted a nice, friendly, altruistic world and devised a theory of why this should be so.

Now, while I fully agree their methods were wrong, I want to take a closer look at the word “altruism” in this context.

  Is a cow a vegetarian?

Think about this question, if you will, before reading on.

I would say no, it’s not. True, a cow only eats plants but there is a crucial difference that separates it from a real vegetarian. When a cow is hungry its brain tells it to eat grass, it doesn’t give the option to choose meat. A cow’s digestive system is specialized in processing grass, eating meat would send it haywire. 

A vegetarian, on the other hand, is a human, an omnivore, he can just as easily process food from animal as plant sources. Not eating meat is a deliberate and conscious choice.

The point I’m getting at is that eating plants because that’s all you can do doesn’t make you a real vegetarian. Luckily we have a convenient term to make this distinction: herbivore.

Now lets go back to altruism.

Bees have been called altruistic; after all, what greater sacrifice can an organism bring then its ability to reproduce? What if we, to stop overpopulation, sterilize every newborn child for the next three years.

Every time we meet one of those children we would give them a pat on the back and congratulate them for the enormous amounts of altruism they have displayed. I doubt many of them would agree.

It’s not really altruism if you have no choice, is it? The difference between true altruism and cases like this is deliberate choice and doing more then “default helping”.

In short: whenever the group selectionists saw a herbivore, they called it a vegetarian. Just like we make a distinction between herbivores and vegetarians, I would like to see someone introducing a new term for that-thing-animals-do-that-looks-like-altruism.

p.s. This is my very first article on this site, any feedback and tips would be greatly appreciated.