The trouble with Melody is it can be hard to tell where the FUD ends and the legitimate criticism begins. I would welcome the existence of more impartial/rational sounding critics with inside experience.
I am, as you know, deeply sceptical concerning the prospects of a cryonics technology that works any time in the foreseeable future, for scientific and technological reasons.
And engineer hubris is endemic amongst technologists. Reinventing the wheel is perfectly normal behaviour, unfortunately.
I think the questions Maxim asks can be asked in a reasonable form, and are the sort of questions that cryonics advocates need to be able to answer. That is, you can separate the factual questions from the tone of the piece. And you in particular need to, because you’re a staunch advocate.
You get the critics you get, not the idealised ones you’d like. Do you think you could go through and extract the reasonable questions to ask? Someone really, really needs to. The issues Maxim raises are not inherently unreasonable questions, even if you want to set the “villain bit” on her. She won’t stop asking, and her questions sound reasonable and others will start asking and wondering if there aren’t answers.
CI suspension reports appear to include made-up and misunderstood medical terms. What is going on here?
Where did EUCRIO come from? Where did 26-year-old David Styles find the many qualified, trained, cryonics-friendly medical personnel he says he has on call? Who are they? [*]
How closely aware of the state of mainstream medical technology are cryonics advocates, so as to avoid reinventing the wheel?
etc., etc.
You must also remember that every other human endeavour with thousands of dollars sloshing around (even from life insurance) attracts a vast ecology of financial parasites, who are in it for a buck. Compare a technology that sells hope but works, such as IVF—there the technology works well enough, but the bit that involves selling hope attracts an amazing range of parasites who have caused much more of its regulation than the philosophical issues did.
I’m frankly amazed that, as far as I can tell, cryonics hasn’t attracted this sort of parasite, and divining the reasons it hasn’t would be worth study. However, you can’t expect people to just believe the parasites aren’t there, because that’s out of step with reasonable human expectation based on the way it plays out in almost every other field. Cryonics has to look extremely honest as well as being honest.
[*] and please note that I’m not in any way doubting David Styles’ sincerity either. I do, however, think it sounds like previous cases I’ve seen of someone who’s in way over his head and doesn’t realise it yet.
You get the critics you get, not the idealised ones you’d like.
This is a good point. But… at the same time, there are limits to who should be taken seriously. If a person insists on questions on the order of whether you’ve stopped beating your wife yet, they aren’t a critic worth replying to. That said, in this context the term would have to be “bozo bit” not “villian bit” as far as I’m concerned—I tend not to paint things black and white as far as character goes, but I accept that there are those who are pointless to reason with (at least at given points in time, for given topics). It seems very plausible that Melody has laudable motives.
I’m not particularly good at ignoring noise, unfortunately, and I am not an expert at what goes on at cryonics organizations. If someone who is wants to step in and reply that’s great. (I am definitely glad this topic has reached the attention of Less Wrong.) My own staunch support for cryonics is not aligned with the success of any particular organization. I think some stabilization is better than no stabilization, but I don’t have an opinion on whether SA is grossly incompetent or not.
It does seem likely to me that they are at least under-utilizing available technologies and probably not using specialists to the degree possible.
Indeed. The critics of cryonics on the Rick Ross boards, for example, have gone way over the edge of serious consideration. And I know some of these people—they were fellow critics in the great battle against Scientology, they sincerely believe they’re doing a good thing, and they have a great deal of experience in dealing with cultishness, financial parasites and those who sell false hope. Unfortunately, they then take this to presume clear organisational incompetence is evidence of actual evil, and then start dehumanising the people they’ve assigned the villain bit. It’s a good example of a failure to examine one’s own thinking.
The Anticult accuses me of advocating child sacrifice because of a thought experiment I posted on the ImmInst forum, which he pulled out of context. I can understand now how Jews feel about blood libel.
The articles on her blog near the beginning (http://cryomedical.blogspot.com/2007_07_08_archive.html) are interesting and troubling. They seem more credible because she appears to be in constructive criticism mode rather than in FUD mode. I encourage other Cryonics members to read these.
Assuming there’s something to what she says, it would be interesting to consider why this is happening. Why is competence so hard to come by in the cryonics world? Is it because cryonics is a small isolated community that tends to operate more by group loyalty rather than meritocracy? Are there other factors of the small scale, such as a relatively small hiring pool? Does belief in cryonics tend to act as a negative filter towards responsible people, or towards responsible thinking?
Part of it may be that it filters for people predisposed to think they know better than others, since they are already bucking the trend. This might lead them to rely less on established practice than they should.
I think the first thing to consider is incentives. The cryonics industry is for-profit, meaning that it is in the best interest of cryonics providers to attract more patients. This also means that they have incentives to keep their costs down wherever possible. One way to do this is, as Melody suggests, is to make it look like you know what you’re doing—whether you actually know what you’re doing is irrelevant. Hence, if cryonics providers think they can continue to appear competent, they have no incentive to actually become competent by performing research and hiring trained personnel, as doing so would only raise costs.
Um, SA is nominally for-profit. EUCRIO might be as well. CI and Alcor aren’t.
But that’s irrelevant, as keeping costs down is obviously a priority regardless of the nature of the institution. I’m not sure the appearance of competence is cheaper in the real world though—Melody accuses them of being inefficient with their resources and underutilizing pre-existing technologies.
Hence, if cryonics providers think they can continue to appear competent, they have no incentive to actually become competent by performing research and hiring trained personnel, as doing so would only raise costs.
Cryonics is run largely by cryonicists. There is a non-monetary incentive to actually be competent. It’s just (apparently) not working well enough.
I’m not sure the appearance of competence is cheaper in the real world though
You may be correct in terms of equipment and research, but not in terms of hiring competent staff. It might be that Meoldy’s assessment of the situation is closer to the truth:
When I tried to convince my manager that the equipment SA needed to perform these procedures already existed, I was met with a tremendous amount of resistance. I wanted to believe that person was simply ignorant of vascular cannulations and perfusion and the related equipment, but it was impossible to believe that, for very long. It soon became quite clear to me that he did not want to use existing equipment because the “research” we were doing was the construction of HIS designs. Not only were his designs vastly inferior to existing equipment, but they were exponentially more expensive than existing equipment, due to the man-hours involved. He was easily making six figures, and he was paying several people, very generously, to assist him with his “R&D” projects, none of which would have made sense to anyone familiar with the medical procedures SA was trying to deliver. (He was also engaging in adolescent, manipulative behaviors, such as asking his employees to spy on one another, and coercing them into allowing him to use their email addresses, to support his own projects and further his political agendas.)
What are your thoughts on her conclusions?
There is a non-monetary incentive to actually be competent.
I agree only to a certain extent—I wouldn’t be surprised if a large number of cryonicists were just trying to make some money. From Melody’s blog:
At first, I was unaware of the amount of money involved, so when I was told SA couldn’t buy certain equipment, or hire qualified personnel, because such things were “too expensive,” I believed those lies. Later, I found out Suspended Animation was receiving over a million dollars a year, from Life Extension Foundation (LEF) / Saul Kent and Bill Faloon. Others at Suspended Animation agreed with me, that the many of the projects were a ridiculous waste of time and money, but at least two of them encouraged me to “play along,” so we could all keep collecting our very generous salaries. It’s hard to blame them, for wanting that. We could come and go, as we pleased, or sit at our desks playing on the Internet all day, and no one would complain...at least not for so long as we didn’t object to the mind-bendingly ridiculous design and fabrication projects, going on in the workshop.
Actually cryonics resembles progressive talk radio in most American markets. Those stations can’t compete with profitable conservative talk radio stations, so they need private donations to stay on the air.
Cryonics also resembles Austrian economics, which requires subsidies from American businessmen like the Koch brothers to stay in existence because otherwise its professors can’t find regular academic jobs and get their books published. (I call these professors “kept Austrians,” analogous to “kept women.”) Even then Austrian economists often have to give their books away, like Jehovah’s Wtinesses or something, because nobody wants to buy them. By contrast, the non-Austrian economists who publish those Freakonomics books seem to meet a genuine market demand.
Competence is pretty hard to come by in any industry. There’s no reason to expect cryonics to be different, especially when you can’t really tell from the outside which companies are competent until it becomes time to revive people.
It seems to me there should be some less direct way to measure competence of personnel besides the patient being revived with intact memories. I believe this kind of feedback mechanism was the original goal of case reports. Perhaps having everyone wear video glasses and audio recorders would be ideal. The more detail of what actually goes on is available for review (not necessarily to the public for patient privacy reasons, but perhaps to independent experts) the less likely mistakes will be repeated.
The trouble with Melody is it can be hard to tell where the FUD ends and the legitimate criticism begins.
‘FUD’ seems unwarranted here—she seems better informed on the subject than the average LessWronger.
You may disagree with her conclusions, but I don’t see any reason to think she’s motivated by fear.
I would welcome the existence of more impartial/rational sounding critics with inside experience.
If Alcor and the like are a bunch of incompetent on-artists squeezing money out of gullible con-artists, then any rational critic with inside experience will start screaming bloody murder about them—and thus, won’t sound impartial at all. Would you only listen to criticism of say Josef Mengele if it sounded “impartial”? Taking sides isn’t evidence of irrationality.
Now, I don’t know nearly enough about Alcor and the like to know whether they are con artists or not, and even if they are they might still be the best chance for today’s 70-year-old to see what the 30th century looks like.
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt would be the feelings I think Melody is trying to instill, not necessarily the ones motivating her. She seems motivated by anger.
This does not necessarily mean that fear, uncertainty or doubt are irrational feelings about the prospect of trusting one’s infinite future to apparent organisational incompetents. Especially sincere ones, as sincere ones are much harder to convince they’re doing anything wrong. Organisational robustness is actually really really important.
Wouldn’t insincere ones be harder to really convince they’re doing anything wrong (in terms of actions taken, not words spoken), since they don’t care whether or not they’re doing it right? Insincere ones might accept criticism and then not make any changes, whereas sincere ones might fight harder against criticism but actually make real changes if convinced. There may be some usefulness in contacting cryonics organizations about criticisms against them and eliciting responses, as well as eliciting evidence to back up responses.
Not in my experience—the insincere can be convinced to fall back to a different not-necessarily-sincere position, whereas the sincere tend to take an attack on their beliefs or actions as an attack on themselves.
The apposite consideration here is Dumas’ razor, “I prefer rogues to imbeciles, because rogues sometimes rest.”
(In the original French, “J’aime mieux les méchants que les imbéciles, parce qu’ils se reposent.” Or various other renderings, e.g. “Je préfère le méchant à l’imbécile, parce que l’imbécile ne se repose jamais” [”… because the imbecile never rests”] or “Si je devais faire un choix, entre les méchants et les imbéciles, ce serait les méchants, parce qu’ils se reposent.” It appears to be something Dumas fils said in response to Victor Hugo saying “Les méchants envient et haïssent; c’est leur manière d’admirer” [“The wicked envy and hate; it’s their form of admiration”] and others liked and wrote down, not something he wrote, but it’s a popular quote for a reason.)
That’s true. And she does seem to have some amount of motivated cognition. But it does seem like she has outlined correctly some pretty glaring problems with general competence and ethics of cryonics organizations.
As we all know by now, we shouldn’t use cognitive biases as a counterargument against people we disagree with. Either her criticisms are true or they aren’t; whether she is committing motivated cognition is irrelevant.
I agree that she brings up some very important points, and I would be very interested to see them discussed herein.
Well, yes, but in so far as she is an expert in her subfield and some amount of judgement about her as an expert is occurring, that she’s engaging in motivated congnition does become relevant.
The articles on her blog near the beginning (http://cryomedical.blogspot.com/2007_07_08_archive.html) are interesting and troubling. They seem more credible because she appears to be in constructive criticism mode rather than in FUD mode.
The trouble with Melody is it can be hard to tell where the FUD ends and the legitimate criticism begins. I would welcome the existence of more impartial/rational sounding critics with inside experience.
I am, as you know, deeply sceptical concerning the prospects of a cryonics technology that works any time in the foreseeable future, for scientific and technological reasons.
The organisational issues are a whole other reason to worry, however. You have a lot of financially shaky organisations (it’s an expensive business to run as a charity) run by people who radiate weirdness signals and thus make it less likely for the rest of the world to take their concerns seriously. Which is a failure in instrumental rationality. And Alcor (Mike Darwin in particular) is famously litigation-happy against those it perceives as critics, which is a BIG cultural warning sign these days.
I must stress that I do not see any reason whatsoever to assume villainy. I am struck by the deep sincerity of pretty much any cryonics advocate I have ever encountered. However, organisations of smart, sincere people are remarkably capable of stupidity.
And engineer hubris is endemic amongst technologists. Reinventing the wheel is perfectly normal behaviour, unfortunately.
I think the questions Maxim asks can be asked in a reasonable form, and are the sort of questions that cryonics advocates need to be able to answer. That is, you can separate the factual questions from the tone of the piece. And you in particular need to, because you’re a staunch advocate.
You get the critics you get, not the idealised ones you’d like. Do you think you could go through and extract the reasonable questions to ask? Someone really, really needs to. The issues Maxim raises are not inherently unreasonable questions, even if you want to set the “villain bit” on her. She won’t stop asking, and her questions sound reasonable and others will start asking and wondering if there aren’t answers.
CI suspension reports appear to include made-up and misunderstood medical terms. What is going on here?
Where did EUCRIO come from? Where did 26-year-old David Styles find the many qualified, trained, cryonics-friendly medical personnel he says he has on call? Who are they? [*]
How closely aware of the state of mainstream medical technology are cryonics advocates, so as to avoid reinventing the wheel?
etc., etc.
You must also remember that every other human endeavour with thousands of dollars sloshing around (even from life insurance) attracts a vast ecology of financial parasites, who are in it for a buck. Compare a technology that sells hope but works, such as IVF—there the technology works well enough, but the bit that involves selling hope attracts an amazing range of parasites who have caused much more of its regulation than the philosophical issues did.
I’m frankly amazed that, as far as I can tell, cryonics hasn’t attracted this sort of parasite, and divining the reasons it hasn’t would be worth study. However, you can’t expect people to just believe the parasites aren’t there, because that’s out of step with reasonable human expectation based on the way it plays out in almost every other field. Cryonics has to look extremely honest as well as being honest.
[*] and please note that I’m not in any way doubting David Styles’ sincerity either. I do, however, think it sounds like previous cases I’ve seen of someone who’s in way over his head and doesn’t realise it yet.
This is a good point. But… at the same time, there are limits to who should be taken seriously. If a person insists on questions on the order of whether you’ve stopped beating your wife yet, they aren’t a critic worth replying to. That said, in this context the term would have to be “bozo bit” not “villian bit” as far as I’m concerned—I tend not to paint things black and white as far as character goes, but I accept that there are those who are pointless to reason with (at least at given points in time, for given topics). It seems very plausible that Melody has laudable motives.
I’m not particularly good at ignoring noise, unfortunately, and I am not an expert at what goes on at cryonics organizations. If someone who is wants to step in and reply that’s great. (I am definitely glad this topic has reached the attention of Less Wrong.) My own staunch support for cryonics is not aligned with the success of any particular organization. I think some stabilization is better than no stabilization, but I don’t have an opinion on whether SA is grossly incompetent or not.
It does seem likely to me that they are at least under-utilizing available technologies and probably not using specialists to the degree possible.
Indeed. The critics of cryonics on the Rick Ross boards, for example, have gone way over the edge of serious consideration. And I know some of these people—they were fellow critics in the great battle against Scientology, they sincerely believe they’re doing a good thing, and they have a great deal of experience in dealing with cultishness, financial parasites and those who sell false hope. Unfortunately, they then take this to presume clear organisational incompetence is evidence of actual evil, and then start dehumanising the people they’ve assigned the villain bit. It’s a good example of a failure to examine one’s own thinking.
The Anticult accuses me of advocating child sacrifice because of a thought experiment I posted on the ImmInst forum, which he pulled out of context. I can understand now how Jews feel about blood libel.
But there’s no reason not to answer hypotheticals.
And yet, it still seems more likely to succeed than bury-and-allow-to-rot technology, or burn-at-a-high-temperature technology.
The articles on her blog near the beginning (http://cryomedical.blogspot.com/2007_07_08_archive.html) are interesting and troubling. They seem more credible because she appears to be in constructive criticism mode rather than in FUD mode. I encourage other Cryonics members to read these.
Assuming there’s something to what she says, it would be interesting to consider why this is happening. Why is competence so hard to come by in the cryonics world? Is it because cryonics is a small isolated community that tends to operate more by group loyalty rather than meritocracy? Are there other factors of the small scale, such as a relatively small hiring pool? Does belief in cryonics tend to act as a negative filter towards responsible people, or towards responsible thinking?
Part of it may be that it filters for people predisposed to think they know better than others, since they are already bucking the trend. This might lead them to rely less on established practice than they should.
I think the first thing to consider is incentives. The cryonics industry is for-profit, meaning that it is in the best interest of cryonics providers to attract more patients. This also means that they have incentives to keep their costs down wherever possible. One way to do this is, as Melody suggests, is to make it look like you know what you’re doing—whether you actually know what you’re doing is irrelevant. Hence, if cryonics providers think they can continue to appear competent, they have no incentive to actually become competent by performing research and hiring trained personnel, as doing so would only raise costs.
Um, SA is nominally for-profit. EUCRIO might be as well. CI and Alcor aren’t.
But that’s irrelevant, as keeping costs down is obviously a priority regardless of the nature of the institution. I’m not sure the appearance of competence is cheaper in the real world though—Melody accuses them of being inefficient with their resources and underutilizing pre-existing technologies.
Cryonics is run largely by cryonicists. There is a non-monetary incentive to actually be competent. It’s just (apparently) not working well enough.
You may be correct in terms of equipment and research, but not in terms of hiring competent staff. It might be that Meoldy’s assessment of the situation is closer to the truth:
What are your thoughts on her conclusions?
I agree only to a certain extent—I wouldn’t be surprised if a large number of cryonicists were just trying to make some money. From Melody’s blog:
Actually cryonics resembles progressive talk radio in most American markets. Those stations can’t compete with profitable conservative talk radio stations, so they need private donations to stay on the air.
Cryonics also resembles Austrian economics, which requires subsidies from American businessmen like the Koch brothers to stay in existence because otherwise its professors can’t find regular academic jobs and get their books published. (I call these professors “kept Austrians,” analogous to “kept women.”) Even then Austrian economists often have to give their books away, like Jehovah’s Wtinesses or something, because nobody wants to buy them. By contrast, the non-Austrian economists who publish those Freakonomics books seem to meet a genuine market demand.
Competence is pretty hard to come by in any industry. There’s no reason to expect cryonics to be different, especially when you can’t really tell from the outside which companies are competent until it becomes time to revive people.
It seems to me there should be some less direct way to measure competence of personnel besides the patient being revived with intact memories. I believe this kind of feedback mechanism was the original goal of case reports. Perhaps having everyone wear video glasses and audio recorders would be ideal. The more detail of what actually goes on is available for review (not necessarily to the public for patient privacy reasons, but perhaps to independent experts) the less likely mistakes will be repeated.
‘FUD’ seems unwarranted here—she seems better informed on the subject than the average LessWronger.
You may disagree with her conclusions, but I don’t see any reason to think she’s motivated by fear.
If Alcor and the like are a bunch of incompetent on-artists squeezing money out of gullible con-artists, then any rational critic with inside experience will start screaming bloody murder about them—and thus, won’t sound impartial at all. Would you only listen to criticism of say Josef Mengele if it sounded “impartial”? Taking sides isn’t evidence of irrationality.
Now, I don’t know nearly enough about Alcor and the like to know whether they are con artists or not, and even if they are they might still be the best chance for today’s 70-year-old to see what the 30th century looks like.
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt would be the feelings I think Melody is trying to instill, not necessarily the ones motivating her. She seems motivated by anger.
This does not necessarily mean that fear, uncertainty or doubt are irrational feelings about the prospect of trusting one’s infinite future to apparent organisational incompetents. Especially sincere ones, as sincere ones are much harder to convince they’re doing anything wrong. Organisational robustness is actually really really important.
Wouldn’t insincere ones be harder to really convince they’re doing anything wrong (in terms of actions taken, not words spoken), since they don’t care whether or not they’re doing it right? Insincere ones might accept criticism and then not make any changes, whereas sincere ones might fight harder against criticism but actually make real changes if convinced. There may be some usefulness in contacting cryonics organizations about criticisms against them and eliciting responses, as well as eliciting evidence to back up responses.
Not in my experience—the insincere can be convinced to fall back to a different not-necessarily-sincere position, whereas the sincere tend to take an attack on their beliefs or actions as an attack on themselves.
The apposite consideration here is Dumas’ razor, “I prefer rogues to imbeciles, because rogues sometimes rest.”
(In the original French, “J’aime mieux les méchants que les imbéciles, parce qu’ils se reposent.” Or various other renderings, e.g. “Je préfère le méchant à l’imbécile, parce que l’imbécile ne se repose jamais” [”… because the imbecile never rests”] or “Si je devais faire un choix, entre les méchants et les imbéciles, ce serait les méchants, parce qu’ils se reposent.” It appears to be something Dumas fils said in response to Victor Hugo saying “Les méchants envient et haïssent; c’est leur manière d’admirer” [“The wicked envy and hate; it’s their form of admiration”] and others liked and wrote down, not something he wrote, but it’s a popular quote for a reason.)
That’s true. And she does seem to have some amount of motivated cognition. But it does seem like she has outlined correctly some pretty glaring problems with general competence and ethics of cryonics organizations.
As we all know by now, we shouldn’t use cognitive biases as a counterargument against people we disagree with. Either her criticisms are true or they aren’t; whether she is committing motivated cognition is irrelevant.
I agree that she brings up some very important points, and I would be very interested to see them discussed herein.
Well, yes, but in so far as she is an expert in her subfield and some amount of judgement about her as an expert is occurring, that she’s engaging in motivated congnition does become relevant.
The articles on her blog near the beginning (http://cryomedical.blogspot.com/2007_07_08_archive.html) are interesting and troubling. They seem more credible because she appears to be in constructive criticism mode rather than in FUD mode.