I’m curious to know what you think a “naive” version of the expert opinion principle is, and what a less-naive one would be.
After thinking about this beyond my comments on Twitter, one issue is that judgments about cryonics aren’t just judgments about cryonics—they’re about future technology that could be used to revive / upload cryopreserved people. I think I’d expect biologists (esp. neuroscientists and cryobiologists) to be trustworthy on current preservation techniques, but few will have anything approaching expertise about future technology.
I don’t know. I’m more confident that the expert dismissal of cryonics is not founded in expertise than I am of any particular strategy on when to defer to expert belief. so I’d use cryonics to measure the strategy rather than vice versa.
By and large cryonics critics don’t make clear exactly what part of the cryonics argument they mean to target, so it’s hard to say exactly whether it covers an area of their expertise, but it’s at least plausible to read them as asserting that cryopreserved people are information-theoretically dead, which is not guesswork about future technology and would fall under their area of expertise.
I’m curious to know what you think a “naive” version of the expert opinion principle is, and what a less-naive one would be.
After thinking about this beyond my comments on Twitter, one issue is that judgments about cryonics aren’t just judgments about cryonics—they’re about future technology that could be used to revive / upload cryopreserved people. I think I’d expect biologists (esp. neuroscientists and cryobiologists) to be trustworthy on current preservation techniques, but few will have anything approaching expertise about future technology.
I don’t know. I’m more confident that the expert dismissal of cryonics is not founded in expertise than I am of any particular strategy on when to defer to expert belief. so I’d use cryonics to measure the strategy rather than vice versa.
By and large cryonics critics don’t make clear exactly what part of the cryonics argument they mean to target, so it’s hard to say exactly whether it covers an area of their expertise, but it’s at least plausible to read them as asserting that cryopreserved people are information-theoretically dead, which is not guesswork about future technology and would fall under their area of expertise.