Actually, the recent posts on cryonics have dug up new information, some of which contradicts Eliezer’s earlier assertions. The cost of cryonics has been established as much higher than $300/year for some people (e.g. myself). The difficulty of signing up if you live outside the US has been highlighted. The strong opposition of a mainstream group of scientists, cryobiologists, has been brought forward. Our best efforts to uncover actual evidence against the basic science (ciphergoth’s current focus of inquiry) have not yet succeeded. But we keep going.
Your argument from utility has received responses, for instance I have clearly stated that at $300/year I would jump to sign up, since I already spend at least that much on things that bring me a negligible increase in life satisfaction. The quote I have received is closer to $2000/year and that is large enough to give me pause, given that I currently enjoy an unreliable level of income as a freelancer.
But your argument is also an argument in favor, to anyone who has enough money that the marginal utility of $2000/year becomes insignificant so that the expected utility of longer life again dominates.
If you’re going to call “groupthink” on the current discussion, I request that you hold yourself to at least as high an epistemic standard as the people who are participating in the discussion, and substantiate your accusation of groupthink with actual evidence and analysis.
Otherwise, “groupthink” can too easily become one of those reverse applause lights. What should we call them, “boo lights”? Are those used on TV? Anyway, I’ve seen people (here and elsewhere) use the word to cheaply establish their status as a skeptic, without actually doing any critical thinking or even basic due diligence. That devalues the technical meaning of “groupthink”.
We want the term groupthink to still be useful when we really need it—when we actually succumb to groupthink.
Thanks. The bottom half I’m already planning to yank up to a post, per wedrifid’s request, probably tomorrow and certainly sometime this week.
The top half only summarizes evidence discussed elsewhere in the Normal Cryonics thread and the root post, all of which I hope will get consolidated somewhere at some point—though I’m less sure I’ll be the one to do that.
I find myself wondering how common this kind of thing is in the LW corpus—people finding useful observations buried under heavily downvoted ones, presumably egregious mistakes. (I tend to think better about things by explaining them to others, and mistakes tend to draw out my most sincere attempts. But that could be just me.) LW is old enough by now that mining the comments database might yield interesting patterns.
Last half comment + more expansion and a few linkages to the other related concepts you refer to + top level post = lots of karma + happy wedrifid + An easy link-to-previous-post comment to go with the downvotes that so many of us use in these sorts of situations.
Actually, the recent posts on cryonics have dug up new information, some of which contradicts Eliezer’s earlier assertions. The cost of cryonics has been established as much higher than $300/year for some people (e.g. myself). The difficulty of signing up if you live outside the US has been highlighted. The strong opposition of a mainstream group of scientists, cryobiologists, has been brought forward. Our best efforts to uncover actual evidence against the basic science (ciphergoth’s current focus of inquiry) have not yet succeeded. But we keep going.
Your argument from utility has received responses, for instance I have clearly stated that at $300/year I would jump to sign up, since I already spend at least that much on things that bring me a negligible increase in life satisfaction. The quote I have received is closer to $2000/year and that is large enough to give me pause, given that I currently enjoy an unreliable level of income as a freelancer.
But your argument is also an argument in favor, to anyone who has enough money that the marginal utility of $2000/year becomes insignificant so that the expected utility of longer life again dominates.
If you’re going to call “groupthink” on the current discussion, I request that you hold yourself to at least as high an epistemic standard as the people who are participating in the discussion, and substantiate your accusation of groupthink with actual evidence and analysis.
Otherwise, “groupthink” can too easily become one of those reverse applause lights. What should we call them, “boo lights”? Are those used on TV? Anyway, I’ve seen people (here and elsewhere) use the word to cheaply establish their status as a skeptic, without actually doing any critical thinking or even basic due diligence. That devalues the technical meaning of “groupthink”.
We want the term groupthink to still be useful when we really need it—when we actually succumb to groupthink.
I vote down any comment that is no more than an accusation of groupthink without evidence. It’s the genetic fallacy.
It sounds like the kind of thing that would contribute to groupthink.
What a fine comment to be posted under a parent voted down to −5 where no one will ever see it.
Thanks. The bottom half I’m already planning to yank up to a post, per wedrifid’s request, probably tomorrow and certainly sometime this week.
The top half only summarizes evidence discussed elsewhere in the Normal Cryonics thread and the root post, all of which I hope will get consolidated somewhere at some point—though I’m less sure I’ll be the one to do that.
I find myself wondering how common this kind of thing is in the LW corpus—people finding useful observations buried under heavily downvoted ones, presumably egregious mistakes. (I tend to think better about things by explaining them to others, and mistakes tend to draw out my most sincere attempts. But that could be just me.) LW is old enough by now that mining the comments database might yield interesting patterns.
I’m not sure that merited a top-level post, but it would merit a top-level comment in this thread.
Last half comment + more expansion and a few linkages to the other related concepts you refer to + top level post = lots of karma + happy wedrifid + An easy link-to-previous-post comment to go with the downvotes that so many of us use in these sorts of situations.
Will do.