I met a significant percentage of my friends on a message board associated with a webcomic called The Order of the Stick. Others I met in school. One I met when she sent me a fan e-mail regarding my first webcomic. A majority of my friends, I met through people I already knew through one method or another.
When I pop out into the bright and glorious future, might they have a super-Facebook that would ferry me the cream of the friendship crop and have me re-ensconced in a comfy social net in a week tops? Maybe. But that’s adding one more if to the long string of ifs that cryonics already is, and that’s the if I can’t get over. What I do know is that my standard methods of making friends can’t be relied upon to work. I do not expect to wake up to fans of my webcomic eagerly awaiting my defrosting. I do not expect to wake up to find the Order of the Stick forum bustling with activity. I don’t expect to wake up to find myself enrolled in school. I certainly don’t expect that, if nobody I’m friends with gets frozen, I’ll be introduced to any of their friends.
In certain moods, that might be enough to push me to sign up, but the moods rarely last long enough that I could rely on the impetus from one to get through all the necessary paperwork.
Hmm, what about an outside view? That is, thinking about what it would be like for someone else. I’m a little too sleepy now to recall the exact reference, but there was something said here about how people make better estimates e.g. about how long a project will take if they think about how long similar projects have taken then how long they think this project will take. And, because you know about the present, let’s make our thought experiment happen in the present.
So, what if a woman was frozen a hundred years ago, and woke up today? Would she be able to make any friends? Would anyone care about anything she cared about? Would anyone be interested in her?
Another thought that occurs to me is that making friends is a skill that can be learned like any other skill. Perhaps you haven’t needed to be very skilled at making friends because you’ve grown up in this environment where friends have come to you fairly easily. So if you practice and become really good at that skill and have demonstrated to yourself that you can make friends easily in any situation, then you’d alleviate the worry that is causing you to feel conflicted about cryonics?
I imagine such a woman would be viewed as a worthwhile curiosity, but probably not a good prospective friend, by history geeks and journalists. I think she would find her sensibilities and skills poorly suited to letting her move comfortably about in mainstream society, which would inhibit her ability to pick up friends in other contexts. If there were other defrostees, she might connect with them in some sort of support group setting (now I’m imagining an episode of Futurama the title of which eludes me), which might provide the basis for collaboration and maybe, eventually, friendship, but it seems to me that that would take a while to develop if in fact it worked.
I would expect that it would be very natural to treat defrostees like foreign exchange students or refugees. They would be taken care of by a plain old mothering type like me, that are empathetic and understand what it’s like to wake up in a foreign place. I would show this 18th century woman places that she would relate to (the grocery store, the library, window shopping downtown) and introduce her to people, a little bit at a time. It would be a good 6-9 months before she felt quite acclimated, but by then she’d be finding a set of friends and her own interests. When she felt overwhelmed, I would tell her to take a bath and spend an evening reading a book.
I’ve stayed in foster homes in several countries for a variety of reasons, and this is quite usual.
Hmm, I wonder if you could leave instructions, kind of like a living will except in reverse, so to speak… e.g., “only unfreeze me if you know I’ll be able to make good friends and will be happy”. Perhaps with a bit more detail explaining what “good friends” and “being happy” means to you :-)
If I were in charge of defrosting people, I’d certainly respect their wishes to the best of my ability.
And, if your life does turn out to be miserable, you can, um, always commit suicide then… you don’t have to commit passive suicide now just in case… :-)
But it certainly is a huge leap in the dark, isn’t it? With most decisions, we have some idea of the possible outcomes and a sense of likelihoods...
Well, if everyone else they’ve revived so far has ended up a miserable outcast in an alien society, or some other consistent outcome, they might be able to take a guess at it.
If I’m in charge of unfreezing people, and I’m intelligent enough, it becomes a simple statistical analysis. I look at the totality of historical information available about the past life of frozen people: forum posts, blog postings, emails, youtube videos… and find out what correlates with the happiness or unhappiness of people who have been unfrozen. Then the decision depends what confidence level you’re looking for: do you want to be unfrozen if there’s a 80% chance that you’ll be happy? 90%? 95%? 99%? 99.9%?
Two, I might not be intelligent enough, or there might not be enough data available, or we might not be finding useful statistical correlates. Then if your instructions are to not unfreeze you if we don’t know, we don’t unfreeze you.
Three, I might be incompetent or mistaken so that I unfreeze you even if there isn’t any good evidence that you’re going to be happy with your new situation.
I met a significant percentage of my friends on a message board associated with a webcomic called The Order of the Stick. Others I met in school. One I met when she sent me a fan e-mail regarding my first webcomic. A majority of my friends, I met through people I already knew through one method or another.
When I pop out into the bright and glorious future, might they have a super-Facebook that would ferry me the cream of the friendship crop and have me re-ensconced in a comfy social net in a week tops? Maybe. But that’s adding one more if to the long string of ifs that cryonics already is, and that’s the if I can’t get over. What I do know is that my standard methods of making friends can’t be relied upon to work. I do not expect to wake up to fans of my webcomic eagerly awaiting my defrosting. I do not expect to wake up to find the Order of the Stick forum bustling with activity. I don’t expect to wake up to find myself enrolled in school. I certainly don’t expect that, if nobody I’m friends with gets frozen, I’ll be introduced to any of their friends.
Well, at least you’ll have the Less Wrong reunion.
In the vanishingly small fraction of worlds where the Earth is not destroyed.
I follow Nick Bostrom on anthropic reasoning as well as existential risk, so I expect to see you there.
In certain moods, that might be enough to push me to sign up, but the moods rarely last long enough that I could rely on the impetus from one to get through all the necessary paperwork.
Hmm, what about an outside view? That is, thinking about what it would be like for someone else. I’m a little too sleepy now to recall the exact reference, but there was something said here about how people make better estimates e.g. about how long a project will take if they think about how long similar projects have taken then how long they think this project will take. And, because you know about the present, let’s make our thought experiment happen in the present.
So, what if a woman was frozen a hundred years ago, and woke up today? Would she be able to make any friends? Would anyone care about anything she cared about? Would anyone be interested in her?
Another thought that occurs to me is that making friends is a skill that can be learned like any other skill. Perhaps you haven’t needed to be very skilled at making friends because you’ve grown up in this environment where friends have come to you fairly easily. So if you practice and become really good at that skill and have demonstrated to yourself that you can make friends easily in any situation, then you’d alleviate the worry that is causing you to feel conflicted about cryonics?
I imagine such a woman would be viewed as a worthwhile curiosity, but probably not a good prospective friend, by history geeks and journalists. I think she would find her sensibilities and skills poorly suited to letting her move comfortably about in mainstream society, which would inhibit her ability to pick up friends in other contexts. If there were other defrostees, she might connect with them in some sort of support group setting (now I’m imagining an episode of Futurama the title of which eludes me), which might provide the basis for collaboration and maybe, eventually, friendship, but it seems to me that that would take a while to develop if in fact it worked.
(Meta) I wish byrnema had not deleted their comment which was in this position.
I would expect that it would be very natural to treat defrostees like foreign exchange students or refugees. They would be taken care of by a plain old mothering type like me, that are empathetic and understand what it’s like to wake up in a foreign place. I would show this 18th century woman places that she would relate to (the grocery store, the library, window shopping downtown) and introduce her to people, a little bit at a time. It would be a good 6-9 months before she felt quite acclimated, but by then she’d be finding a set of friends and her own interests. When she felt overwhelmed, I would tell her to take a bath and spend an evening reading a book.
I’ve stayed in foster homes in several countries for a variety of reasons, and this is quite usual.
Hmm, I wonder if you could leave instructions, kind of like a living will except in reverse, so to speak… e.g., “only unfreeze me if you know I’ll be able to make good friends and will be happy”. Perhaps with a bit more detail explaining what “good friends” and “being happy” means to you :-)
If I were in charge of defrosting people, I’d certainly respect their wishes to the best of my ability.
And, if your life does turn out to be miserable, you can, um, always commit suicide then… you don’t have to commit passive suicide now just in case… :-)
But it certainly is a huge leap in the dark, isn’t it? With most decisions, we have some idea of the possible outcomes and a sense of likelihoods...
Why would they be in a position to know that I’d be able to make good friends and be happy?
Well, if everyone else they’ve revived so far has ended up a miserable outcast in an alien society, or some other consistent outcome, they might be able to take a guess at it.
Bit of a gap between “not a miserable outcast in an alien society” and “has good close friends”.
I can think of three possibilities...
If I’m in charge of unfreezing people, and I’m intelligent enough, it becomes a simple statistical analysis. I look at the totality of historical information available about the past life of frozen people: forum posts, blog postings, emails, youtube videos… and find out what correlates with the happiness or unhappiness of people who have been unfrozen. Then the decision depends what confidence level you’re looking for: do you want to be unfrozen if there’s a 80% chance that you’ll be happy? 90%? 95%? 99%? 99.9%?
Two, I might not be intelligent enough, or there might not be enough data available, or we might not be finding useful statistical correlates. Then if your instructions are to not unfreeze you if we don’t know, we don’t unfreeze you.
Three, I might be incompetent or mistaken so that I unfreeze you even if there isn’t any good evidence that you’re going to be happy with your new situation.