There is practically no chance cyonics can work, there is no evidence of it ever being done successfully. Everything we know points to it being impossible: Freezing things makes water expand and burst the fragile parts of your brain. All the information necessary to revive you will simply be destroyed, even with futuristic recovery devices I feel that there’s no hope of it working. I’m against convincing yourself otherwise to buy peace of mind because this enables people to exploit you for money and also goes against rationality to beleive in something that isn’t true.
Because spending the time to look up references solid enough that they cannot be glibly rejected indicates that I think someone is worth educating, that I can educate them, or it’s a sign of respect.
None of those three are true. So if you think you are right, you are free to bring your own references to the table.
I downvoted you not because I disagree with your stance on cryonics (in fact I share it), but because you didn’t link to or provide the material that convinced you of the unfeasibility of cryonics, or what could make you change your mind (i.e. successful revival of a primate).
Minor nitpick that is worth noting because a lot of highly educated people use this as a signaling issue for education level: “e.g.” is for an example. “i.e” is for restating something.
Really? I always thought i.e. stood for “individual example”. I’m really not sure where I got that idea, now that I think about it. Thanks for the pointer.
They are Latin abbreviations. i.e. stands for “id est” meaning “that is” or “that means”, e.g. stands for “exempli gratia” meaning “for the sake of example”.
I was going to say “Come on LW! Obvious troll is obvious.” but then I remembered this recent post...
This person appears to take pleasure in being downvoted consdering how much it is happening. Moreover, they aren’t curious as to what norms they’re violating to receive so much downvoting indicating some awareness. Their username is automatically controversial, but it can’t even be a plausibly effective advocacy account for 9/11 conspiracy beliefs because then they would be polite the other rhetorical dimensions, so as to appear likable and be more effective at persuasion.
Admittedly, many of the beliefs they express are somewhat common, but they express too many of them too densely and with too much half-accurate background knowledge for it to be plausible. If you look at their other comments you’ll see them on a wide variety of topics, all of them dumb. Generally stupidity goes with a lack of intellectual passion in weird areas, which displays itself as ignorance and a tendency towards silence. Plus, 911truther is responding line-by-line to too many responses—there’s no sense of measured consideration or update delay, just the glee of someone who is being argued with by people who don’t realize that in doing so they are feeding a troll.
So a kind of interesting question here is who is behind the troll account? (It is a pretty good job if you stop and think about it. I mean… who trolls on the subject of genetic algorithmswith this much plausibility?)
But a more educational question is why are there so many responses, when we could have just downvoted to −10 and had one or two responses providing epistemic warnings to readers who might not understand, and then moved on? Is it the pleasure of scoring points on someone who is wrong? Is it a mistaken presumption of good faith because so many on LW write in good faith? I’m serious here. I’m honestly interested in LW’s radar for trolling. Troll radar seems like an important epistemic skill that many of us lack, and I think there’s something interesting in this lack.
One example: I have had to deal with people going on and on with “but it’s not really you!” arguments about mind uploading on other forums on several separate occasions. Of course it’s annoying to press on about it entirely by yourself, so I don’t really bother and move on after a post or two. Here, I don’t have to repeat myself over and over very often, and the userbase is sympathetic, so keeping systemic obnoxiousness out of the environment is feasible enough that we should crush it with overwhelming force.
If it’s a troll, I’d guess either Eliezer being meta or maybe Mitchell Porter trying to make a point, but I’ve seen people this oblivious before.
If it’s a troll, I’d guess either Eliezer being meta or maybe Mitchell Porter trying to make a point, but I’ve seen people this oblivious before.
If they are making a point about necessity of downvoting, I must admit that it works perfectly.
But yes, contributors of this kind have high prior probability of appearing spontaneously on the internet. I have probably met an example or two in real life, too.
Yes, it wasn’t obvious to me. Partly because I expect common hostility to be mislabelled as trolling, and partly because even just the obvious hostility was enough that it didn’t seem worth paying that much attention to—it looked like a classic example of politics as the mind killer. The thing about freezing and cryogenics though—it seems like someone from lesswrong would already know the counter argument, and 911truther did seem familiar with lesswrong. I have updated towards the troll possibility.
ETA: I hadn’t read the genetic algorithm comment until now, so there’s another example of me missing evidence of trolling. The thing is, paying more attention doesn’t seem like a good idea. I am glad I read your comment to point me a specific example rather than their whole comment history.
there is no evidence of it ever being done successfully.
There is evidence that cryonics preserves brain structure to some extent, which, coupled with the fact that people are brains, constitutes Bayesian evidence that cryonics suspensions performed up to this point were successful (that is, information-theoretic death didn’t happen). What you require as evidence in this case might be a clear-cut demonstration of a cryonics patient getting revived. However, if we already knew how to revive people we wouldn’t bother with cryosuspension in the first place. You can’t, at this point in time, reasonably expect that kind of evidence, even if cryonics works perfectly.
Freezing things makes water expand and burst the fragile parts of your brain.
Correctly performed cryosuspension involves vitrification instead of freezing.
You didn’t say anything explicitly wrong except vitrification can’t work 100% yet, ice crystals are still formed. information-theoretic “death” may not have happened but the claim that recovery may be possible in the far future is a seriously dubious, so is the evasive attempts of beleivers like gwern to maintain this beleif without backing it up.
You are trying to submit too fast. try again in 7 minutes.
You didn’t say anything explicitly wrong except vitrification can’t work 100% yet, ice crystals are still formed. information-theoretic “death” may not have happened but the claim that recovery may be possible in the far future is a seriously dubious
What exactly is your argument here? Why do you think vitrification doesn’t work, especially given you hadn’t heard of it until a few minutes ago?
Are you now shifting your argument to ‘yes, vitrification works to preserve everything, but we won’t be clever enough to make any use of the preservation’?
You are self-identifying as a 9/11 “truther”, which is signalling to us that you are a crank with a persecution complex. The fact that you subsequently verified delusions of persecution is just digging yourself into a deeper hole.
I have no such delusions. If you look at my user page (http://lesswrong.com/user/911truther) it’s blatantly obvious that someone is systematically downvoting everything I post multiple times. I don’t claim to be persecuted but clearly there is an attempt to censor me. Frankly it just proves that I’m right, if I was wrong people could easily disprove me.
Maybe some people dislike you and are downvoting all your comments because if was you who wrote them (“karmassassination”). But all of your comments are low-quality enough for downvotes, taken individually. People are not disproving you because you sound like a troll.
If you’re not actually a troll, please lurk more, try to understand the norms around here, read up on the standard answers to everything you think of posting (e.g. look for other posts on cryonics here and Alcor’s FAQ before you say cryo sucks), and find the most on-topic posts to comment on (old posts on whether cryonics is a good idea, rather than a new post on how to sign up for it). If you want help with that, answer here or message me, we’ll start Accidental Trolls Anonymous. If you want to argue that your posts are not actually obnoxious (as opposed to being involuntarily obnoxious because you don’t get LW yet), I’ll just ignore you.
I have read the arguments against cryonics on RationalWiki and I know that it is not accepted in mainstream. I am thus not interested in arguments that do not go further than “It won’t work, no way!”
Seems correct, since the karma system is used to signal what is interesting to the community and you apparently produce content that is uninteresting in this community.
Cells are routinely frozen and thawed in labs doing cell culture. Tissue is a lot harder, but if you use a different medium (routine during cryopreservation) you can probably preserve even microscopic structures such as synapses.
This shows the difference between the purely “skeptic” mentality versus the mentality of an inventive problem solver.
“There is practically no chance cyonics [sic] can work” really means “There is practically no chance cryonics can work” given the way cryonics organizations currently perform their suspensions, a way of framing the problem which I find worth discussing, because I think it comes closer to the truth and doesn’t discourage exploring new approaches to the problem.
While I consider this an unrealistic fantasy so far, I’d like to think that a couple of bright & energetic college students somewhere with aspirations of becoming the next Steve Wozniak, Sergey Brin or Bill Gates will discover cryonics, notice that the field has stayed relatively neglected and underdeveloped so far, and decide to go into it to revolutionize the technology. In the meantime that leaves us cryonicists with the burden of trying to nudge the kludge into something closer to feasibility.
There is practically no chance cyonics can work, there is no evidence of it ever being done successfully. Everything we know points to it being impossible: Freezing things makes water expand and burst the fragile parts of your brain. All the information necessary to revive you will simply be destroyed, even with futuristic recovery devices I feel that there’s no hope of it working. I’m against convincing yourself otherwise to buy peace of mind because this enables people to exploit you for money and also goes against rationality to beleive in something that isn’t true.
Freezing canard: proof you have not read the cryonics literature. Instant downvote.
If “the cryonics literature” (presumably explaining why freezing does not destroy the brain) actually exists why don’t you link to it?
You are trying to submit too fast. try again in 4 minutes.
Remember: Downvotes are censorship, if you don’t want your beleifs questioned you’re doing the right thing.
That is true; however the converse (“if you do want your beliefs questioned, you’re doing the wrong thing”) isn’t.
Because spending the time to look up references solid enough that they cannot be glibly rejected indicates that I think someone is worth educating, that I can educate them, or it’s a sign of respect.
None of those three are true. So if you think you are right, you are free to bring your own references to the table.
You do not have enough karma to downvote right now. You need 1 more point.
It’s blatantly obvious that you only beleive in cryonics to get upvotes here. I already explained why it’s not possible..
PHD in biomedical engineering agrees with me http://www.quora.com/Cryogenics/Is-it-technically-possible-to-undergo-cryogenics-and-wake-up-500-years-later
Yes, you can get up votes here if you don’t think cryonics will work. You got down voted for rejecting it out of hand without doing any research.
I have done research and seen this before.
I downvoted you not because I disagree with your stance on cryonics (in fact I share it), but because you didn’t link to or provide the material that convinced you of the unfeasibility of cryonics, or what could make you change your mind (i.e. successful revival of a primate).
Minor nitpick that is worth noting because a lot of highly educated people use this as a signaling issue for education level: “e.g.” is for an example. “i.e” is for restating something.
Really? I always thought i.e. stood for “individual example”. I’m really not sure where I got that idea, now that I think about it. Thanks for the pointer.
They are Latin abbreviations. i.e. stands for “id est” meaning “that is” or “that means”, e.g. stands for “exempli gratia” meaning “for the sake of example”.
A mnemonic that helped me before I knew the Latin: “i.e.” = “in other words”.
Thanks! I never knew that.
Please, never post on Less Wrong again.
You do not have enough karma to downvote right now. You need 1 more point.
You’re pointing to a grad student—not even a cryobiologist. Try googling “kidney cryobiology”.
Isolated indeed.
I was going to say “Come on LW! Obvious troll is obvious.” but then I remembered this recent post...
This person appears to take pleasure in being downvoted consdering how much it is happening. Moreover, they aren’t curious as to what norms they’re violating to receive so much downvoting indicating some awareness. Their username is automatically controversial, but it can’t even be a plausibly effective advocacy account for 9/11 conspiracy beliefs because then they would be polite the other rhetorical dimensions, so as to appear likable and be more effective at persuasion.
Admittedly, many of the beliefs they express are somewhat common, but they express too many of them too densely and with too much half-accurate background knowledge for it to be plausible. If you look at their other comments you’ll see them on a wide variety of topics, all of them dumb. Generally stupidity goes with a lack of intellectual passion in weird areas, which displays itself as ignorance and a tendency towards silence. Plus, 911truther is responding line-by-line to too many responses—there’s no sense of measured consideration or update delay, just the glee of someone who is being argued with by people who don’t realize that in doing so they are feeding a troll.
So a kind of interesting question here is who is behind the troll account? (It is a pretty good job if you stop and think about it. I mean… who trolls on the subject of genetic algorithms with this much plausibility?)
But a more educational question is why are there so many responses, when we could have just downvoted to −10 and had one or two responses providing epistemic warnings to readers who might not understand, and then moved on? Is it the pleasure of scoring points on someone who is wrong? Is it a mistaken presumption of good faith because so many on LW write in good faith? I’m serious here. I’m honestly interested in LW’s radar for trolling. Troll radar seems like an important epistemic skill that many of us lack, and I think there’s something interesting in this lack.
One example: I have had to deal with people going on and on with “but it’s not really you!” arguments about mind uploading on other forums on several separate occasions. Of course it’s annoying to press on about it entirely by yourself, so I don’t really bother and move on after a post or two. Here, I don’t have to repeat myself over and over very often, and the userbase is sympathetic, so keeping systemic obnoxiousness out of the environment is feasible enough that we should crush it with overwhelming force.
If it’s a troll, I’d guess either Eliezer being meta or maybe Mitchell Porter trying to make a point, but I’ve seen people this oblivious before.
If they are making a point about necessity of downvoting, I must admit that it works perfectly.
But yes, contributors of this kind have high prior probability of appearing spontaneously on the internet. I have probably met an example or two in real life, too.
Yes, it wasn’t obvious to me. Partly because I expect common hostility to be mislabelled as trolling, and partly because even just the obvious hostility was enough that it didn’t seem worth paying that much attention to—it looked like a classic example of politics as the mind killer. The thing about freezing and cryogenics though—it seems like someone from lesswrong would already know the counter argument, and 911truther did seem familiar with lesswrong. I have updated towards the troll possibility.
ETA: I hadn’t read the genetic algorithm comment until now, so there’s another example of me missing evidence of trolling. The thing is, paying more attention doesn’t seem like a good idea. I am glad I read your comment to point me a specific example rather than their whole comment history.
Oops I was getting mixed up with another user who also kept mentioning not having enough karma to downvote, and being rate-limited in commenting.
spelled wrong and I’m not a troll.
There is evidence that cryonics preserves brain structure to some extent, which, coupled with the fact that people are brains, constitutes Bayesian evidence that cryonics suspensions performed up to this point were successful (that is, information-theoretic death didn’t happen). What you require as evidence in this case might be a clear-cut demonstration of a cryonics patient getting revived. However, if we already knew how to revive people we wouldn’t bother with cryosuspension in the first place. You can’t, at this point in time, reasonably expect that kind of evidence, even if cryonics works perfectly.
Correctly performed cryosuspension involves vitrification instead of freezing.
You didn’t say anything explicitly wrong except vitrification can’t work 100% yet, ice crystals are still formed. information-theoretic “death” may not have happened but the claim that recovery may be possible in the far future is a seriously dubious, so is the evasive attempts of beleivers like gwern to maintain this beleif without backing it up.
You are trying to submit too fast. try again in 7 minutes.
What exactly is your argument here? Why do you think vitrification doesn’t work, especially given you hadn’t heard of it until a few minutes ago?
Are you now shifting your argument to ‘yes, vitrification works to preserve everything, but we won’t be clever enough to make any use of the preservation’?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oocyte_cryopreservation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_frog
http://www.alcor.org/cryomyths.html
You are self-identifying as a 9/11 “truther”, which is signalling to us that you are a crank with a persecution complex. The fact that you subsequently verified delusions of persecution is just digging yourself into a deeper hole.
I have no such delusions. If you look at my user page (http://lesswrong.com/user/911truther) it’s blatantly obvious that someone is systematically downvoting everything I post multiple times. I don’t claim to be persecuted but clearly there is an attempt to censor me. Frankly it just proves that I’m right, if I was wrong people could easily disprove me.
If you posted something not obnoxious, I’m inclined to believe the community would, in fact, upvote it.
Maybe some people dislike you and are downvoting all your comments because if was you who wrote them (“karmassassination”). But all of your comments are low-quality enough for downvotes, taken individually. People are not disproving you because you sound like a troll.
If you’re not actually a troll, please lurk more, try to understand the norms around here, read up on the standard answers to everything you think of posting (e.g. look for other posts on cryonics here and Alcor’s FAQ before you say cryo sucks), and find the most on-topic posts to comment on (old posts on whether cryonics is a good idea, rather than a new post on how to sign up for it). If you want help with that, answer here or message me, we’ll start Accidental Trolls Anonymous. If you want to argue that your posts are not actually obnoxious (as opposed to being involuntarily obnoxious because you don’t get LW yet), I’ll just ignore you.
I have read the arguments against cryonics on RationalWiki and I know that it is not accepted in mainstream. I am thus not interested in arguments that do not go further than “It won’t work, no way!”
You do not have enough karma to downvote right now. You need 1 more point.
Seems correct, since the karma system is used to signal what is interesting to the community and you apparently produce content that is uninteresting in this community.
Cells are routinely frozen and thawed in labs doing cell culture. Tissue is a lot harder, but if you use a different medium (routine during cryopreservation) you can probably preserve even microscopic structures such as synapses.
There are a bunch of papers debunking that here. Scroll down past the names (although you may be tempted to pay attention to some of them).
This shows the difference between the purely “skeptic” mentality versus the mentality of an inventive problem solver.
“There is practically no chance cyonics [sic] can work” really means “There is practically no chance cryonics can work” given the way cryonics organizations currently perform their suspensions, a way of framing the problem which I find worth discussing, because I think it comes closer to the truth and doesn’t discourage exploring new approaches to the problem.
While I consider this an unrealistic fantasy so far, I’d like to think that a couple of bright & energetic college students somewhere with aspirations of becoming the next Steve Wozniak, Sergey Brin or Bill Gates will discover cryonics, notice that the field has stayed relatively neglected and underdeveloped so far, and decide to go into it to revolutionize the technology. In the meantime that leaves us cryonicists with the burden of trying to nudge the kludge into something closer to feasibility.