you agree that the future will not bring past people back, at least not many?
I’d say that most futures that still have biological humans will reanimate all cryo patients (there are currently about 100), if only because it will actually be rather cheap and it has game-theoretic and signalling benefits. Also, in a population of trillions of future humans, 1000 or so cryo patients would each have a living doing tours, educating, etc. As, of course, would 1000 people from the middle ages in our society.
Is it such an outlandish scenario that given adequate and safe technology cryonics patients will be revived because of humanitarian and moral concerns? I see no reason why we’d switch to a burden-asset evaluation scheme of human beings when we have moved beyond that a long time ago (or more likely we never really adhered purely to it). As of now, there are rather few slaves around and we mostly refrain from killing retarded infants.
Human trafficking is a massive problem that goes mostly unreported in the media.
Due to the illegal nature of trafficking and differences in methodology, the exact extent is unknown. According to United States State Department data, an “estimated 600,000 to 820,000 men, women, and children [are] trafficked across international borders each year, approximately 70 percent are women and girls and up to 50 percent are minors. The data also illustrates that the majority of transnational victims are trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation.” However, they go on to say that “the alarming enslavement of people for purposes of labor exploitation, often in their own countries, is a form of human trafficking that can be hard to track from afar.”
Before mattnewport’s comment, was there any fact or important value being disputed here, or merely how much negative affect we should be feeling and expressing about that number?
It was supposed to be a convincing list which definitively shows that 800,000 people being tortured and raped by other human beings is not very much, as you claimed.
Yes, aging is bad, good for that insight. I remain convinced that human trafficking is as bad as I perceive it to be; it’s right up there with war-in-general and certain epidemic diseases.
It was only partly intended to be snarky, there was also a genuine question intended. It’s not clear to me whether the 800,000 is particularly important to you. You could somewhat reasonably claim that you would still consider this a very serious issue even if only 1⁄10 as many people were actually affected.
I don’t know where the cutoff is. The articles you linked downgraded my concern about the topic, or rather, increased my error bars to the point where I no longer feel comfortable placing it in any particular category.
I know that I regularly mock news reports if they mention fewer than 100 deaths and costs in the billions to solve/prevent in the same segment, the most recent example being the Toyota recalls. I expect I’m doing lazy cost-utility analysis.
Before mattnewport’s comment, was there any fact or important value being disputed here, or merely how much negative affect we should be feeling and expressing about that number?
I introduced a trivial fact (the number) which I felt was relevant to the comment as far as the definition of ‘very few’. I am disputing a pointless definition, and honestly I don’t care that much, but gwern’s smug tone got me angry enough to reply to a months old discussion that hardly mattered in the first place.
It isn’t. Wikipedia tells me that 100,000 people die of aging every day after decades of suffering. So unless each of that 800,000 - remembering that aging deaths are only going to go up and mattnewport’s articles on that 800k being inflated, and that the rapes and tortures are not the average, but extremes, much like Uncle Tom was not the usual experience of Southern US slaves—suffers 45x more than each aging victim, aging is a much bigger problem than human trafficking.
Yes, it is a much bigger problem, and I already admitted that, and I champion that cause myself. I still think human trafficking fits somewhere above ‘very few’, and that for problems on the scope of aging there do not exist adjectives capable of expressing that weight of suffering. I’m also incapable of caring about one thing to the exclusion of all others.
To summarize: Defining “not very much” as “less than 100,000 per day” makes it a useless phrase.
I don’t think it’s useless. We should only care about the largest problems, especially when there’s orders of magnitude between the largest problems and suggested-other-problems-we-should-care-about.
To steal an example from Eliezer: to divvy up your resources and mental effort among multiple causes, some of which are very small, is like seeing a spinning wheel which is 20% red and 80% blue, and thinking, ‘I’ll make the most money by betting 20% of the time on red and 80% of the time on blue!’ Actually, one should just bet 100% of the time on blue, and win 80% of the time; the other strategy would win <80%.
To put it another way, what on earth makes you think the marginal value of your dollar or interest helps human trafficking more than aging?
Human trafficking is a durable institution driven by powerful interests and countless intersecting conditions of life, and arguably will persist as long as economic disparity means there are people who wish to move from ‘poor’ countries to ‘rich’ countries. Working against that is about as likely to help as the trillions poured down the drain of Africa.
Aging, on the other hand, is ‘just’ an engineering problem, which nothing prevents researchers from directly tackling, and it’s not a vicious cycle of interests and desires, but a virtuous one—if you can help the first credible breakthrough be made, the free market may well do the rest (because everyone needs a cure for aging, it’s the largest possible market).
This sort of post is why I get so pissed off at this place, made all the worse because I’ve already agreed, twice, that aging is more important on a scale that there exist no adjectives to even describe, and that I consider this argument pointlessand that I’ve already changed my categorization (right over there, maybe you should read the rest of the thread?).
I’ve also made similar scale arguments in support of other initiatives (on this very article!), and I back them up with action. What the fuck more do you want from me? That I stop caring about humans? That I quit my job and start trafficking slaves to force them to work in our anti-aging mines?
and that I consider this argument pointless and that I’ve already changed my categorization (right over there, maybe you should read the rest of the thread?).
I apologize for not re-reading the other threads on each reply; when I get the red box, I tend to read just that.
That I quit my job and start trafficking slaves to force them to work in our anti-aging mines?
Yes. The spice must flow!
You are one heartless son of a bitch.
I keep it in inside a needle, which is in an egg, which is in a duck, which is in a hare, which is in an iron chest, which is buried under a green oak tree, which is on the island of Buyan, in the ocean. As long as my heart is safe, I shall never die.
Before mattnewport’s comment, was there any fact or important value being disputed here, or merely how much negative affect we should be feeling and expressing about that number?
I do not concede my point that human trafficking is a big problem, and your smug, passive aggressive response only angers me rather than in any way being convincing. Despite the fact I agree with the fundamental point and have constantly tried to get other people to recognize the massive problem of aging-as-a-disease and how we can help correct it. Good way to piss off your supporters. Prick.
Further, consider this from the point of view of a parent. It’s OK for a 20-something young adult to decide to take this risk, but how can a parent take this risk for their child? I wouldn’t have children if I didn’t feel as though I had some control over whether they were well taken care of—how could I send them to an unknown point in the future? Today, there are many people and organizations that exploit children. I’m supposed to glibly pretend that these problems will completely disappear just with future technology? That would be pretty irresponsible.
A lot of people make some argument along the lines of, ’if they revive us, it’s because they value us.” Yeah. And if they value children, without their mommies?
This just breaks my heart, because I can understand the fear. I wouldn’t want to have children if I thought they’d be taken away from me. But if I already had them, I would want them alive first and foremost. Even if that meant they’d be taken away. Living far away > dying in my arms.
I can imagine my kids in bad situations, and in most of those situations I would want them to keep living. If I was dying during some kind of terrible revolution, I wouldn’t kill my children to protect them from an unknown future. They’re already alive, come what may.
Cryonics feels like a choice again, and for me this is a moral choice—perhaps a deontological one. I am willing to hear a variety of moral solutions/arguments, I just think this is something that needs address.
I depend upon society to help me explore what the ethical issues are so that I can make up my own mind in an informed way. I’m not an ethicist or a pastor, I’ve specialized in a different area.
By “cryonics feels like a choice again”, do you mean it bears emotional similarity to choosing to have children in the first place, more than choosing to let them go on living, and therefore you wouldn’t sign your children up to be revived under any circumstances you wouldn’t have chosen to have them in the first place?
If so, I hope you will do everything you can to reverse that impression. Think of the frozen people as asleep, comatose, blinking, time-traveling—not dead. They will be revived not as infants, not as new people, not as ontologically unrelated snippets of personhood wearing secondhand names—they will wake up. If your children are frozen and revived, then afterwards, they will be alive. If your children are not frozen and revived, then absent really convenient timing, they will be dead.
This sounds reasonable to me, so I’m not sure why it doesn’t feel conclusive. Maybe I’m just waiting for the revolutionary to contribute his necessary component.
Last night, I had a sad dream that my brother’s little child passed away. (I guess my brain thought this was safe, because my brother doesn’t have kids.) The dream just had one theme: the regret that I felt that when the child died, she was gone forever.
My dream was just an emotion and didn’t address my waking concerns at all.
It so happened in my dream that the child died in a way that was perfect for cryo-preservation, and there was an infrastructure for cryonics in the sense that everyone else in the family decided to sign up for cryonics just a little bit later. The extreme sadness was that they would continue in the future forever without the little one. The sadness of her being left behind was very painful.
Don’t leave your children behind. You don’t have the problem with them that I have with my sister. You have the power to sign them up. You don’t have to let your imaginary niece’s fate happen to your kids.
Cryonics feels like a choice again, and for me this is a moral choice—perhaps a deontological one. I am willing to hear a variety of moral solutions/arguments, I just think this is something that needs address.
You seem to be thinking as if a person dies, and then cryonics is a way that can maybe bring them back to life. It is more accurate to say that a person loses the capacity to to sustain their own life (and experience it), and cryonics is a way to keep them alive until potential future technology can restore their ability to sustain and experience their life.
Can we please focus on one argument against cryonics at a time? Isn’t this shifting to a new counterargument whenever an old one is addressed just logical rudeness?
If you don’t dispute anything I actually say about technical feasibility, please take this discussion elsewhere.
EDIT: Downvotes are useful information, but comments explaining them are even better—thanks!
I didn’t down vote you but I do feel frustrated about the censure. First, I obviously don’t think technological feasibility is anywhere near the right question. So I should just ignore this post. (But) secondly, other people are discussing other issues—this whole thread is all about whether or not we’ll get revived and why; it has nothing to do with technology. If I don’t respond to this thread because it’s off-topic, then I’m just missing an opportunity to further an agenda that is very important to me. I like to follow rules but I’m not likely to follow them sacrificially while others disregard them.
An important subtext of the current extended discussion, which in one sense can be seen as fallout from the “Normal Cryonics” article, is how to conduct a debate in a manner that is both epistemically and instrumentally rational.
One major issue, raised by the “Logical rudeness” post, is that ordinary conversation has a nasty tendency to go in circles revolving around each interlocutor’s pet anxiety or trigger issue. No one is exempt: I tend to focus on the financial and logistical aspects, and that says something about me.
Rather than think of ciphergoth’s intervention as “censure”, please think of it as the unpleasant but necessary work of a volunteer facilitator, doing his best to keep the conversation on track.
This conversation touches on an issue that is deeply important to you, that much I understand. Perhaps your interests are better served by your drafting a separate post to lay out this issue as clearly as you can, a post in which you’d set out to apply the thinking tools you’ve learned from LW or that you wish to introduce to LW?
Your first point I think you answer yourself, is that fair? Your second is a good one, but I wonder what the right thing to do about it is. I did reply to the top-level ancestor comment of this one to say “this is off-topic”; are you saying that where discussion blossoms anyway, that railing against in-thread commenters is a mistake? Certainly where top-level comments have started talking about other arguments, I think that is logical rudeness, and you don’t seem to disagree; is there anything to be done about it beyond the comment on the top-level comment?
Your first point I think you answer yourself, is that fair?
I would have preferred if everyone were conforming, because then my argument could have waited.
I think this just represents a real difference in our goals and objectives: you want focused and on-topic comments, and I want to respond to this thread.
Given the dichotomy in objectives, I think I should make the comment, and you should complain again and down-vote me.
Logistically, you should probably have made it more clear in the Less Wrong post that you were trying to enforce this norm; I didn’t know about this until I read a comment you made far down in the thread that we needed to read and follow the rules in a paragraph at the end of your blog post.
I think we both think the other’s objective is fair enough.
you should probably have made it more clear in the Less Wrong post that you were trying to enforce this norm
I probably should have made it clear, but I’d also like to encourage the norm that with or without such explicit per-post policies, where someone makes a post focussing on counterargument A, that commenting about counterargument B is recognised as logical rudeness. This doesn’t help with the bind you find yourself in today, but might help in future.
Logical rudeness, as I read the article, was referring to switching arguments in the pattern A to B to A but only switching after A was essentially debunked. If byrnema never switches back to A it doesn’t fit the pattern.
I could have misinterpreted the article.
One develops a sense of the flow of discourse, the give and take of argument. It’s possible to do things that completely derail that flow of discourse without shouting or swearing. These may not be considered offenses against politeness, as our so-called “civilization” defines that term. But they are offenses against the cooperative exchange of arguments, or even the rules of engagement with the loyal opposition. They are logically rude.
Okay, I was misinterpreting.
As much as threads are better than anything else I have seen to track multiple participants in a conversation, I get the itch that there is a better way. Maybe I should go find one...
Rain, I’m aware of human trafficking and other abuses, which is the reason I said “rather few” instead of “no”. But compared to just a few hundred years ago slaves are as rare as hen’s teeth.
And yet population nowadays is so much larger than in ancient times so there are claims the absolute number of slaves is currently higher than ever before
The number given in that article is 27 million slaves. Yet Wikipedia claims that 55 million people lived in the Roman Empire in AD 300-400. Were less than half of them slaves? (And that’s ignoring the slaves in the rest of the world at the time.) The same page claims that in 1750, the world population was almost 800 million. Were 29 out of 30 people at the time really free? Surely slavery was more widespread among the hierarchical city cultures that left written records than among the “barbarians”, but it’s hard to imagine that the number has always been less than 27 million. During the Middle Ages, throughout all of Europe, the vast majority of the people were serfs, bound to their land, living and dying at the mercy of their lords.
If it’s true that 249 out of every 250 people today is free, that sounds like a huge improvement over almost all of human history.
Moral standards in general can improve irregardless of the number of people involved. Besides, one could argue that having more slaves is outweighed by having much more non-slaves living good lives. In regard to cryonics: all else being equal I’d favor to be reanimated in a world with low slave to non-slave ratios if I preferred the probability of my becoming a slave to be as low as possible.
If I can create a new person from a frozen corpse, I can probably also create a new person by duplicating a living person. Why would the corpse have precedence on any moral grounds? Either way a new person is created; and duplication results in a person better adjusted to their era and so happier.
Given limited resources, persons will be created by the highest bidders. Many living persons will have a strong interest in self-duplication. Historical interests in reviving people would face economic competition. That’s why I think they would switch to a burden/asset view.
It definitely depends on the what kind of future there’ll be. Robin Hanson’s Malthusian future of scarcity and effective reproduction is a place where your described things would be indeed commonplace. I personally wouldn’t welcome an explosive wave of replication creating so much scarcity that there’d be an actual competition for resources for an number of additional people that is as small as the number of cryonics patients.
Besides, the corpse would have a great deal of precedence on moral grounds, because a death or failure of reanimation is a huge loss of value that already exists (knowledge, personality, memories, psychological complexity etc.), while duplication only enables the additional person to grow into a unique individual sometimes in the future.
I personally wouldn’t welcome an explosive wave of replication creating so much scarcity that there’d be an actual competition for resources for an number of additional people that is as small as the number of cryonics patients.
Even if nearly all people were against replication—which is far from given—to prevent explosive replication you would need to either effectively limit everyone’s access to basic resources (so they couldn’t replicate) or to execute, exile or severely limit the rights of illegally created replicas (including allowing them to die of hunger or equivalent resource starvation).
Short of a sysop scenario, I don’t see how this could be accomplished. Of course my inability to see it isn’t proof of anything much, but just hoping it will happen without describing how to make it happen is pretty flimsy. That’s why I regard resource scarcity as a primary feature of any future until proven otherwise.
the corpse would have a great deal of precedence on moral grounds, because a death or failure of reanimation is a huge loss of value that already exists (knowledge, personality, memories, psychological complexity etc.), while duplication only enables the additional person to grow into a unique individual sometimes in the future.
“Loss of value”—value to whom? Not value to the frozen person, because they don’t exist until revived. Do you think the general public has a moral obligation to increase the diversity of the set of persons in existence? If so, then instead of reviving or duplicating people or even breeding the old fashioned way, they would spend their time artificially engineering new and radically different life forms. Is that what you have in mind?
scarcity as a primary feature of any future until proven otherwise.
I agree with that; the other default future would be extinction. My problem is that I regard full-blown Hansonian future as equivalent to extinction because it similarly leads to the total loss of everything humans care about now, but note that this is a subject of heated dispute and I’m on Eliezer’s and Nick Bostrom’s side.
“Loss of value”—value to whom? Not value to the frozen person, because they don’t exist until revived.
And anaesthetized people don’t exist until resuscitated? There is no meaningful sense in which suspended people automatically cease to exist and then pop back to existence. The sense in which people cease to exist is rather a continuous function of the amount of lost information about people’s brain states. Reanimation from suspension can have as much effect on the subject’s psychology than waking from sleep, or as much as a severe brain injury, depending on the circumstances and the technologies involved. Legal death is a magical category in this case. Of course they exist.
Also, not wanting to die only requires you to not want to die while you’re alive. We would agree that it’s not moral to kill a lot of people on the basis that once they’re nonexistent they won’t care about the matter. To give a closer analogue, it’s not right either to kill sleeping people because they at the moment cannot want to be not killed. Never reviving the suspended me simply equals killing me, with all the moral implications of an ordinary murder. And the fact the revival has some costs does not give it a special status. After all, keeping me alive has its own costs; I could be shot anytime so that more food is left for others.
Do you think the general public has a moral obligation to increase the diversity of the set of persons in existence? If so, then instead of reviving or duplicating people or even breeding the old fashioned way, they would spend their time artificially engineering new and radically different life forms. Is that what you have in mind?
Does the public has a moral obligation to refrain from killing people? I (personally) disapprove of murder, in general. I suspect that the general public has the same feelings—and yes, this is the primary element of what I have in mind about reanimation.
Aside from this consideration above, I (still) argue that reviving people is more valuable than duplication, for other people. There is stuff there in those frickin’ brains you might find amusing, funny, interesting, useful or aesthetically pleasing. It’s a waste to leave that utter amount of complexity and information that a human brain boasts frozen in ice, inactive and unreachable. The act of duplication, on the other hand, creates not a single bit of information that wasn’t already available, it “just” doubles the total future capacity to think, learn, feel, interact and experience.
To turn back to the quote above, we definitely value individuality and diversity. But I just won’t spend my life mindlessly increasing some amount of a specifically defined “diversity” because I’m not like a paperclip optimizator. Also, “Increase diversity” is not a well-formed moral sentence. The concept of diversity is extremely complex to begin with; diversity as it is valued by people is also a magical category with obfuscated boundaries.
That assumption creates some unpleasant conclusions. To make sure I understand you, please consider the following scenarios.
Suppose that our descendants acquire a deep understanding of human brain operation. They build a machine which can generate a brain-description to given parameters, as different from any existing human as normal humans are different from one another. Given a description, a living brain and body can be built and a person created.
Suppose we generate 10^10 different descriptions. Do we now have a moral duty to instantiate them all in real bodies, because once we have some information-theoretical descriptions of them, they are “existing persons”? Note that we haven’t simulated them; we just computed the single-moment-in-time initial states of possible simulations.
Never reviving the suspended me simply equals killing me, with all the moral implications of an ordinary murder.
Then, does reviving you once equal killing the potential second copy of you we could also have revived?
Does the public has a moral obligation to refrain from killing people?
A better comparison would be: does the public have a moral obligation to support minimal living conditions for all already-existing people, and keep them from dying from hunger or disease? I think the answer is yet, but it is not absolute; it works so far because the burden happens to be economically easily bearable. It might also work for reviving people if very few people will ever be frozen, so that the total burden of reviving is small. If ever it came to a real economic tradeoff, reviving people wouldn’t necessarily win.
There is stuff there in those frickin’ brains you might find amusing, funny, interesting, useful or aesthetically pleasing.
Giving birth to children, the old-fashioned way, and so growing new people also creates interesting new brains. Why would reviving ancient people (who were not outstanding thinkers or personalities in their own time) be so rewarding?
The question about diversity referred to the moral situation. You think there’s a moral obligation to revive people, and you justify doing that instead of duplicating people because the duplicates increase the diversity of society. Is there a factor for diversity in your purely moral calculation, or do you think that morally it doesn’t matter what new person you create, and diversity is only a selfish reason to revive a more interesting person?
We don’t kill many infants, but we do abort lots of fetuses, though. I don’t see any obvious reason why we should give a frozen corpse more rights than a fetus. Everyone who is cryopreserved actually did die; reviving one is more like creating a new person than it is like providing medical care to an existing, living person.
Everyone who is cryopreserved actually did die; reviving one is more like creating a new person than it is like providing medical care to an existing, living person.
At Alcor and CI there is much written about the definitions of death; their preferred version (mine too) is information-theoretic death. To be precise, legal death is the moment the doctors decide to stop caring for the patient, mostly because they estimate the chance of successful resuscitation too low. On the other hand, information-theoretic death is the point beyond which no technology can restore a mind. This definition is a bit more precise as it being vague requires us to consider the possibility of reversing entropy (EDIT: in other words, the finality of legal death is pretty questionable, but we can only argue against the finality of information-theoretic death if there is a way to reverse entropy).
The subjective experience of waking up from cryonic suspension could range from identical to waking up from sleep to having suffered a serious and pervasive brain trauma, depending on the circumstances of suspension and reanimation. I wouldn’t automatically categorize reanimated people as newly created persons as I wouldn’t do so in the case of sleeping people or victims of brain injury. They are new persons to the extent the continuity between their pre- and post- suspension selves is lost, and I think the same applies to brain injury victims.
We don’t kill many infants, but we do abort lots of fetuses, though.
Aborting a fetus may or may not be fully moral depending on how developed the fetus is. Killing a zygote is as morally charged as killing a random bacterium. Otherwise, causing suffering to fetuses by abortion is sure a possibility, albeit one that can be reduced by regulations informed by a detailed knowledge of neurosciences.
However, I think the strongest reason why likening cryonics patients to fetuses is ridiculous is that cryonics patients (can) have a huge pile of accumulated life experiences, memories and a unique and rich personality.
I meant that information theoretic-death is a point beyond which restoring a person requires reversing entropy. Thus we can only argue against the finality of this kind of death if there is a way to reverse entropy (which seems not to be the case). I admit my sentence there was too opaque.
Reversing entropy is insufficient. You have to interact with a past that no longer has any traces in the present. It’s not enough to have a way to turn steam into ice cubes. You need a time camera.
[I’m deleting this comment soon. No reason to pick another fight. Maybe I’ll take Morendil’s advice and write a post about how much I disagree with people assuming moral positions for anyone but themselves and where I see that heading. I don’t have time at the moment.]
I urge you to err strongly on the side of not deleting comments. If I post something I later regret, I just edit them to say “oops!” For one thing, it’s easy to overreact and underestimate their quality.
Disagree that we should discuss what people values should be in this post or anywhere on Less Wrong. This is a place about rationality right? NOT MORALIZING.
I’m not willing for this be a place where we discuss what moral judgments are appropriate or not.
We have had numerous top-level posts regarding ethics and meta-ethics; what one should do seems intimately related to rationality. This is already a place where we discuss what moral judgements are correct, and has been since its inception. Example
No, I agree with Roko. Some people would probably want us. It’s just that we’d be consumption goods rather than capital goods.
Just like kids, really. Most 1st Worlders don’t have kids because they are good little workers, they have them because they make them happy. The few dozen cryopreserved people would be a scarce commodity in a world with very few scarcities.
Obviously this would only happen in a nice post-singularity world, or a weird future in which advanced nanotech comes before AI.
It seems to me that the future goes one of two ways: virtually complete disaster (uFAI, other technology disaster, complete loss of humane values) or a fairly strong win for human values with massive easing of material constraints—superabundance.
In the latter group of scenarios, the cost of reanimating someone by scanning and building a new fleshy body for them would be close to nothing, and the market for sentimentally special objects (such as people from before the positive singularity) would be huge.
The scenarios that scare me are those where a friendly AI is built that reasons timelessly that it would have wanted to precommit to placing massive threats/rewards on anyone who knew about the singularity risk problem, and that unfortunately you (or I) in particular performed below some set standard of risk mitigation, and the FAI is going to put us in a horrific torture simulation forever. The argument against this is that rewards motivate better than punishments.
Basically, that the cost of reviving and taking care of large numbers of frozen people will exceed the value of those people to the future, so there won’t be very many frozen people revived.
How do you work that out? We’re talking about a future society that can revive a cryonics patient, how can you be so certain that cost would be an issue for them?
I sort of agree with the argument.
you agree that the future will not bring past people back, at least not many?
I’d say that most futures that still have biological humans will reanimate all cryo patients (there are currently about 100), if only because it will actually be rather cheap and it has game-theoretic and signalling benefits. Also, in a population of trillions of future humans, 1000 or so cryo patients would each have a living doing tours, educating, etc. As, of course, would 1000 people from the middle ages in our society.
I don’t know if they will or won’t, but if they do, we’d be a burden and not an asset.
Is it such an outlandish scenario that given adequate and safe technology cryonics patients will be revived because of humanitarian and moral concerns? I see no reason why we’d switch to a burden-asset evaluation scheme of human beings when we have moved beyond that a long time ago (or more likely we never really adhered purely to it). As of now, there are rather few slaves around and we mostly refrain from killing retarded infants.
Human trafficking is a massive problem that goes mostly unreported in the media.
800,000 out of 7 billion people? That doesn’t sound like very much at all.
Before mattnewport’s comment, was there any fact or important value being disputed here, or merely how much negative affect we should be feeling and expressing about that number?
Please provide a list of things you consider more damaging as far as number of people directly affected per year.
Aging
Wait, I’m sorry, was this supposed to be a complete list?
It was supposed to be a convincing list which definitively shows that 800,000 people being tortured and raped by other human beings is not very much, as you claimed.
Yes, aging is bad, good for that insight. I remain convinced that human trafficking is as bad as I perceive it to be; it’s right up there with war-in-general and certain epidemic diseases.
Would you change your opinion if it turned out that the figures for the number of victims are grossly exaggerated?
Would you update on new evidence? Are you a bayessian? Do you read LessWrong?
The 600,000 to 800,000 figure is cited from a 2005 report; mattnewport’s articles are from 2007.
I was attempting to agree with him in the same snarky format he was using. I could have just said, “Yes.”
It was only partly intended to be snarky, there was also a genuine question intended. It’s not clear to me whether the 800,000 is particularly important to you. You could somewhat reasonably claim that you would still consider this a very serious issue even if only 1⁄10 as many people were actually affected.
I don’t know where the cutoff is. The articles you linked downgraded my concern about the topic, or rather, increased my error bars to the point where I no longer feel comfortable placing it in any particular category.
I know that I regularly mock news reports if they mention fewer than 100 deaths and costs in the billions to solve/prevent in the same segment, the most recent example being the Toyota recalls. I expect I’m doing lazy cost-utility analysis.
I apologize—I’m not good at picking up sarcasm in text.
(I value the impetus to look it up myself, however, so I don’t mind.)
Before mattnewport’s comment, was there any fact or important value being disputed here, or merely how much negative affect we should be feeling and expressing about that number?
I introduced a trivial fact (the number) which I felt was relevant to the comment as far as the definition of ‘very few’. I am disputing a pointless definition, and honestly I don’t care that much, but gwern’s smug tone got me angry enough to reply to a months old discussion that hardly mattered in the first place.
It isn’t. Wikipedia tells me that 100,000 people die of aging every day after decades of suffering. So unless each of that 800,000 - remembering that aging deaths are only going to go up and mattnewport’s articles on that 800k being inflated, and that the rapes and tortures are not the average, but extremes, much like Uncle Tom was not the usual experience of Southern US slaves—suffers 45x more than each aging victim, aging is a much bigger problem than human trafficking.
Yes, it is a much bigger problem, and I already admitted that, and I champion that cause myself. I still think human trafficking fits somewhere above ‘very few’, and that for problems on the scope of aging there do not exist adjectives capable of expressing that weight of suffering. I’m also incapable of caring about one thing to the exclusion of all others.
To summarize: Defining “not very much” as “less than 100,000 per day” makes it a useless phrase.
I don’t think it’s useless. We should only care about the largest problems, especially when there’s orders of magnitude between the largest problems and suggested-other-problems-we-should-care-about.
To steal an example from Eliezer: to divvy up your resources and mental effort among multiple causes, some of which are very small, is like seeing a spinning wheel which is 20% red and 80% blue, and thinking, ‘I’ll make the most money by betting 20% of the time on red and 80% of the time on blue!’ Actually, one should just bet 100% of the time on blue, and win 80% of the time; the other strategy would win <80%.
To put it another way, what on earth makes you think the marginal value of your dollar or interest helps human trafficking more than aging?
Human trafficking is a durable institution driven by powerful interests and countless intersecting conditions of life, and arguably will persist as long as economic disparity means there are people who wish to move from ‘poor’ countries to ‘rich’ countries. Working against that is about as likely to help as the trillions poured down the drain of Africa.
Aging, on the other hand, is ‘just’ an engineering problem, which nothing prevents researchers from directly tackling, and it’s not a vicious cycle of interests and desires, but a virtuous one—if you can help the first credible breakthrough be made, the free market may well do the rest (because everyone needs a cure for aging, it’s the largest possible market).
This sort of post is why I get so pissed off at this place, made all the worse because I’ve already agreed, twice, that aging is more important on a scale that there exist no adjectives to even describe, and that I consider this argument pointless and that I’ve already changed my categorization (right over there, maybe you should read the rest of the thread?).
I’ve also made similar scale arguments in support of other initiatives (on this very article!), and I back them up with action. What the fuck more do you want from me? That I stop caring about humans? That I quit my job and start trafficking slaves to force them to work in our anti-aging mines?
You are one heartless son of a bitch.
I apologize for not re-reading the other threads on each reply; when I get the red box, I tend to read just that.
Yes. The spice must flow!
I keep it in inside a needle, which is in an egg, which is in a duck, which is in a hare, which is in an iron chest, which is buried under a green oak tree, which is on the island of Buyan, in the ocean. As long as my heart is safe, I shall never die.
Troll.
Before mattnewport’s comment, was there any fact or important value being disputed here, or merely how much negative affect we should be feeling and expressing about that number?
I do not concede my point that human trafficking is a big problem, and your smug, passive aggressive response only angers me rather than in any way being convincing. Despite the fact I agree with the fundamental point and have constantly tried to get other people to recognize the massive problem of aging-as-a-disease and how we can help correct it. Good way to piss off your supporters. Prick.
Further, consider this from the point of view of a parent. It’s OK for a 20-something young adult to decide to take this risk, but how can a parent take this risk for their child? I wouldn’t have children if I didn’t feel as though I had some control over whether they were well taken care of—how could I send them to an unknown point in the future? Today, there are many people and organizations that exploit children. I’m supposed to glibly pretend that these problems will completely disappear just with future technology? That would be pretty irresponsible.
A lot of people make some argument along the lines of, ’if they revive us, it’s because they value us.” Yeah. And if they value children, without their mommies?
This just breaks my heart, because I can understand the fear. I wouldn’t want to have children if I thought they’d be taken away from me. But if I already had them, I would want them alive first and foremost. Even if that meant they’d be taken away. Living far away > dying in my arms.
I can imagine my kids in bad situations, and in most of those situations I would want them to keep living. If I was dying during some kind of terrible revolution, I wouldn’t kill my children to protect them from an unknown future. They’re already alive, come what may.
Cryonics feels like a choice again, and for me this is a moral choice—perhaps a deontological one. I am willing to hear a variety of moral solutions/arguments, I just think this is something that needs address.
I wrote in another comment,
By “cryonics feels like a choice again”, do you mean it bears emotional similarity to choosing to have children in the first place, more than choosing to let them go on living, and therefore you wouldn’t sign your children up to be revived under any circumstances you wouldn’t have chosen to have them in the first place?
If so, I hope you will do everything you can to reverse that impression. Think of the frozen people as asleep, comatose, blinking, time-traveling—not dead. They will be revived not as infants, not as new people, not as ontologically unrelated snippets of personhood wearing secondhand names—they will wake up. If your children are frozen and revived, then afterwards, they will be alive. If your children are not frozen and revived, then absent really convenient timing, they will be dead.
This sounds reasonable to me, so I’m not sure why it doesn’t feel conclusive. Maybe I’m just waiting for the revolutionary to contribute his necessary component.
Last night, I had a sad dream that my brother’s little child passed away. (I guess my brain thought this was safe, because my brother doesn’t have kids.) The dream just had one theme: the regret that I felt that when the child died, she was gone forever.
My dream was just an emotion and didn’t address my waking concerns at all. It so happened in my dream that the child died in a way that was perfect for cryo-preservation, and there was an infrastructure for cryonics in the sense that everyone else in the family decided to sign up for cryonics just a little bit later. The extreme sadness was that they would continue in the future forever without the little one. The sadness of her being left behind was very painful.
Don’t leave your children behind. You don’t have the problem with them that I have with my sister. You have the power to sign them up. You don’t have to let your imaginary niece’s fate happen to your kids.
You seem to be thinking as if a person dies, and then cryonics is a way that can maybe bring them back to life. It is more accurate to say that a person loses the capacity to to sustain their own life (and experience it), and cryonics is a way to keep them alive until potential future technology can restore their ability to sustain and experience their life.
Can we please focus on one argument against cryonics at a time? Isn’t this shifting to a new counterargument whenever an old one is addressed just logical rudeness?
If you don’t dispute anything I actually say about technical feasibility, please take this discussion elsewhere.
EDIT: Downvotes are useful information, but comments explaining them are even better—thanks!
I didn’t down vote you but I do feel frustrated about the censure. First, I obviously don’t think technological feasibility is anywhere near the right question. So I should just ignore this post. (But) secondly, other people are discussing other issues—this whole thread is all about whether or not we’ll get revived and why; it has nothing to do with technology. If I don’t respond to this thread because it’s off-topic, then I’m just missing an opportunity to further an agenda that is very important to me. I like to follow rules but I’m not likely to follow them sacrificially while others disregard them.
An important subtext of the current extended discussion, which in one sense can be seen as fallout from the “Normal Cryonics” article, is how to conduct a debate in a manner that is both epistemically and instrumentally rational.
One major issue, raised by the “Logical rudeness” post, is that ordinary conversation has a nasty tendency to go in circles revolving around each interlocutor’s pet anxiety or trigger issue. No one is exempt: I tend to focus on the financial and logistical aspects, and that says something about me.
Rather than think of ciphergoth’s intervention as “censure”, please think of it as the unpleasant but necessary work of a volunteer facilitator, doing his best to keep the conversation on track.
This conversation touches on an issue that is deeply important to you, that much I understand. Perhaps your interests are better served by your drafting a separate post to lay out this issue as clearly as you can, a post in which you’d set out to apply the thinking tools you’ve learned from LW or that you wish to introduce to LW?
Your first point I think you answer yourself, is that fair? Your second is a good one, but I wonder what the right thing to do about it is. I did reply to the top-level ancestor comment of this one to say “this is off-topic”; are you saying that where discussion blossoms anyway, that railing against in-thread commenters is a mistake? Certainly where top-level comments have started talking about other arguments, I think that is logical rudeness, and you don’t seem to disagree; is there anything to be done about it beyond the comment on the top-level comment?
EDIT to make clear: questions are not rhetorical.
I would have preferred if everyone were conforming, because then my argument could have waited.
I think this just represents a real difference in our goals and objectives: you want focused and on-topic comments, and I want to respond to this thread.
Given the dichotomy in objectives, I think I should make the comment, and you should complain again and down-vote me.
Logistically, you should probably have made it more clear in the Less Wrong post that you were trying to enforce this norm; I didn’t know about this until I read a comment you made far down in the thread that we needed to read and follow the rules in a paragraph at the end of your blog post.
I think we both think the other’s objective is fair enough.
I probably should have made it clear, but I’d also like to encourage the norm that with or without such explicit per-post policies, where someone makes a post focussing on counterargument A, that commenting about counterargument B is recognised as logical rudeness. This doesn’t help with the bind you find yourself in today, but might help in future.
Logical rudeness, as I read the article, was referring to switching arguments in the pattern A to B to A but only switching after A was essentially debunked. If byrnema never switches back to A it doesn’t fit the pattern.
I could have misinterpreted the article.
Okay, I was misinterpreting.
As much as threads are better than anything else I have seen to track multiple participants in a conversation, I get the itch that there is a better way. Maybe I should go find one...
It would be nice if we could transplant threads to where they are appropriate, with just a link to and from the old location where they were inspired.
Let’s move this here.
I didn’t read that Ciphergoth was accusing me of logical rudeness—he meant the whole thread. And I agree.
Yes. Thanks.
Rain, I’m aware of human trafficking and other abuses, which is the reason I said “rather few” instead of “no”. But compared to just a few hundred years ago slaves are as rare as hen’s teeth.
And yet population nowadays is so much larger than in ancient times so there are claims the absolute number of slaves is currently higher than ever before
The number given in that article is 27 million slaves. Yet Wikipedia claims that 55 million people lived in the Roman Empire in AD 300-400. Were less than half of them slaves? (And that’s ignoring the slaves in the rest of the world at the time.) The same page claims that in 1750, the world population was almost 800 million. Were 29 out of 30 people at the time really free? Surely slavery was more widespread among the hierarchical city cultures that left written records than among the “barbarians”, but it’s hard to imagine that the number has always been less than 27 million. During the Middle Ages, throughout all of Europe, the vast majority of the people were serfs, bound to their land, living and dying at the mercy of their lords.
If it’s true that 249 out of every 250 people today is free, that sounds like a huge improvement over almost all of human history.
Moral standards in general can improve irregardless of the number of people involved. Besides, one could argue that having more slaves is outweighed by having much more non-slaves living good lives. In regard to cryonics: all else being equal I’d favor to be reanimated in a world with low slave to non-slave ratios if I preferred the probability of my becoming a slave to be as low as possible.
If I can create a new person from a frozen corpse, I can probably also create a new person by duplicating a living person. Why would the corpse have precedence on any moral grounds? Either way a new person is created; and duplication results in a person better adjusted to their era and so happier.
Given limited resources, persons will be created by the highest bidders. Many living persons will have a strong interest in self-duplication. Historical interests in reviving people would face economic competition. That’s why I think they would switch to a burden/asset view.
It definitely depends on the what kind of future there’ll be. Robin Hanson’s Malthusian future of scarcity and effective reproduction is a place where your described things would be indeed commonplace. I personally wouldn’t welcome an explosive wave of replication creating so much scarcity that there’d be an actual competition for resources for an number of additional people that is as small as the number of cryonics patients.
Besides, the corpse would have a great deal of precedence on moral grounds, because a death or failure of reanimation is a huge loss of value that already exists (knowledge, personality, memories, psychological complexity etc.), while duplication only enables the additional person to grow into a unique individual sometimes in the future.
Even if nearly all people were against replication—which is far from given—to prevent explosive replication you would need to either effectively limit everyone’s access to basic resources (so they couldn’t replicate) or to execute, exile or severely limit the rights of illegally created replicas (including allowing them to die of hunger or equivalent resource starvation).
Short of a sysop scenario, I don’t see how this could be accomplished. Of course my inability to see it isn’t proof of anything much, but just hoping it will happen without describing how to make it happen is pretty flimsy. That’s why I regard resource scarcity as a primary feature of any future until proven otherwise.
“Loss of value”—value to whom? Not value to the frozen person, because they don’t exist until revived. Do you think the general public has a moral obligation to increase the diversity of the set of persons in existence? If so, then instead of reviving or duplicating people or even breeding the old fashioned way, they would spend their time artificially engineering new and radically different life forms. Is that what you have in mind?
I agree with that; the other default future would be extinction. My problem is that I regard full-blown Hansonian future as equivalent to extinction because it similarly leads to the total loss of everything humans care about now, but note that this is a subject of heated dispute and I’m on Eliezer’s and Nick Bostrom’s side.
And anaesthetized people don’t exist until resuscitated? There is no meaningful sense in which suspended people automatically cease to exist and then pop back to existence. The sense in which people cease to exist is rather a continuous function of the amount of lost information about people’s brain states. Reanimation from suspension can have as much effect on the subject’s psychology than waking from sleep, or as much as a severe brain injury, depending on the circumstances and the technologies involved. Legal death is a magical category in this case. Of course they exist.
Also, not wanting to die only requires you to not want to die while you’re alive. We would agree that it’s not moral to kill a lot of people on the basis that once they’re nonexistent they won’t care about the matter. To give a closer analogue, it’s not right either to kill sleeping people because they at the moment cannot want to be not killed. Never reviving the suspended me simply equals killing me, with all the moral implications of an ordinary murder. And the fact the revival has some costs does not give it a special status. After all, keeping me alive has its own costs; I could be shot anytime so that more food is left for others.
Does the public has a moral obligation to refrain from killing people? I (personally) disapprove of murder, in general. I suspect that the general public has the same feelings—and yes, this is the primary element of what I have in mind about reanimation.
Aside from this consideration above, I (still) argue that reviving people is more valuable than duplication, for other people. There is stuff there in those frickin’ brains you might find amusing, funny, interesting, useful or aesthetically pleasing. It’s a waste to leave that utter amount of complexity and information that a human brain boasts frozen in ice, inactive and unreachable. The act of duplication, on the other hand, creates not a single bit of information that wasn’t already available, it “just” doubles the total future capacity to think, learn, feel, interact and experience.
To turn back to the quote above, we definitely value individuality and diversity. But I just won’t spend my life mindlessly increasing some amount of a specifically defined “diversity” because I’m not like a paperclip optimizator. Also, “Increase diversity” is not a well-formed moral sentence. The concept of diversity is extremely complex to begin with; diversity as it is valued by people is also a magical category with obfuscated boundaries.
That assumption creates some unpleasant conclusions. To make sure I understand you, please consider the following scenarios.
Suppose that our descendants acquire a deep understanding of human brain operation. They build a machine which can generate a brain-description to given parameters, as different from any existing human as normal humans are different from one another. Given a description, a living brain and body can be built and a person created.
Suppose we generate 10^10 different descriptions. Do we now have a moral duty to instantiate them all in real bodies, because once we have some information-theoretical descriptions of them, they are “existing persons”? Note that we haven’t simulated them; we just computed the single-moment-in-time initial states of possible simulations.
Then, does reviving you once equal killing the potential second copy of you we could also have revived?
A better comparison would be: does the public have a moral obligation to support minimal living conditions for all already-existing people, and keep them from dying from hunger or disease? I think the answer is yet, but it is not absolute; it works so far because the burden happens to be economically easily bearable. It might also work for reviving people if very few people will ever be frozen, so that the total burden of reviving is small. If ever it came to a real economic tradeoff, reviving people wouldn’t necessarily win.
Giving birth to children, the old-fashioned way, and so growing new people also creates interesting new brains. Why would reviving ancient people (who were not outstanding thinkers or personalities in their own time) be so rewarding?
The question about diversity referred to the moral situation. You think there’s a moral obligation to revive people, and you justify doing that instead of duplicating people because the duplicates increase the diversity of society. Is there a factor for diversity in your purely moral calculation, or do you think that morally it doesn’t matter what new person you create, and diversity is only a selfish reason to revive a more interesting person?
We don’t kill many infants, but we do abort lots of fetuses, though. I don’t see any obvious reason why we should give a frozen corpse more rights than a fetus. Everyone who is cryopreserved actually did die; reviving one is more like creating a new person than it is like providing medical care to an existing, living person.
At Alcor and CI there is much written about the definitions of death; their preferred version (mine too) is information-theoretic death. To be precise, legal death is the moment the doctors decide to stop caring for the patient, mostly because they estimate the chance of successful resuscitation too low. On the other hand, information-theoretic death is the point beyond which no technology can restore a mind. This definition is a bit more precise as it being vague requires us to consider the possibility of reversing entropy (EDIT: in other words, the finality of legal death is pretty questionable, but we can only argue against the finality of information-theoretic death if there is a way to reverse entropy).
The subjective experience of waking up from cryonic suspension could range from identical to waking up from sleep to having suffered a serious and pervasive brain trauma, depending on the circumstances of suspension and reanimation. I wouldn’t automatically categorize reanimated people as newly created persons as I wouldn’t do so in the case of sleeping people or victims of brain injury. They are new persons to the extent the continuity between their pre- and post- suspension selves is lost, and I think the same applies to brain injury victims.
Aborting a fetus may or may not be fully moral depending on how developed the fetus is. Killing a zygote is as morally charged as killing a random bacterium. Otherwise, causing suffering to fetuses by abortion is sure a possibility, albeit one that can be reduced by regulations informed by a detailed knowledge of neurosciences.
However, I think the strongest reason why likening cryonics patients to fetuses is ridiculous is that cryonics patients (can) have a huge pile of accumulated life experiences, memories and a unique and rich personality.
That doesn’t sound quite right, can you be a little more precise? If cryonics depended on breaking the Second Law I would have no time for it.
I meant that information theoretic-death is a point beyond which restoring a person requires reversing entropy. Thus we can only argue against the finality of this kind of death if there is a way to reverse entropy (which seems not to be the case). I admit my sentence there was too opaque.
Reversing entropy is insufficient. You have to interact with a past that no longer has any traces in the present. It’s not enough to have a way to turn steam into ice cubes. You need a time camera.
I think the definition is clearer if you avoid reference to entropy, but I get what you’re getting at now. Thanks!
[I’m deleting this comment soon. No reason to pick another fight. Maybe I’ll take Morendil’s advice and write a post about how much I disagree with people assuming moral positions for anyone but themselves and where I see that heading. I don’t have time at the moment.]
I urge you to err strongly on the side of not deleting comments. If I post something I later regret, I just edit them to say “oops!” For one thing, it’s easy to overreact and underestimate their quality.
OK.* I was mainly just trying to prevent another big long sidetrack. Since thomblake already replied, it needs to stay anyway.
*From now on, I’ll just edit with an ‘oops’.
We have had numerous top-level posts regarding ethics and meta-ethics; what one should do seems intimately related to rationality. This is already a place where we discuss what moral judgements are correct, and has been since its inception. Example
No, I agree with Roko. Some people would probably want us. It’s just that we’d be consumption goods rather than capital goods.
Just like kids, really. Most 1st Worlders don’t have kids because they are good little workers, they have them because they make them happy. The few dozen cryopreserved people would be a scarce commodity in a world with very few scarcities.
Obviously this would only happen in a nice post-singularity world, or a weird future in which advanced nanotech comes before AI.
Does it matter? Any future that revives us will be really wealthy.
Most futures that still have human values will reanimate all cryo patients, if scanning and WBE counts as reanimation.
It seems to me that the future goes one of two ways: virtually complete disaster (uFAI, other technology disaster, complete loss of humane values) or a fairly strong win for human values with massive easing of material constraints—superabundance.
In the latter group of scenarios, the cost of reanimating someone by scanning and building a new fleshy body for them would be close to nothing, and the market for sentimentally special objects (such as people from before the positive singularity) would be huge.
The scenarios that scare me are those where a friendly AI is built that reasons timelessly that it would have wanted to precommit to placing massive threats/rewards on anyone who knew about the singularity risk problem, and that unfortunately you (or I) in particular performed below some set standard of risk mitigation, and the FAI is going to put us in a horrific torture simulation forever. The argument against this is that rewards motivate better than punishments.
Disagree that you should be scared rather than curious. Such scenarios are not well worked out.
Which argument?
The one in the link.
Basically, that the cost of reviving and taking care of large numbers of frozen people will exceed the value of those people to the future, so there won’t be very many frozen people revived.
How do you work that out? We’re talking about a future society that can revive a cryonics patient, how can you be so certain that cost would be an issue for them?