I understood Dunning-Kruger quite well. Dunning-Kruger suggests that, barring outside influence, people will believe themselves to be of above-average ability. Incompetent people will greatly overestimate their capability and understanding, and the ability to judge talent in others was proportional to ability in the skill itself—in other words, people who are incompetent are not only incompetent, but also incapable of judging competence in other people.
Competent people, conversely, overestimate the competence of the incompetent; however, they do have the ability to judge incompetence, so when they are allowed to look at the work of others relative to their own, their estimation of their own personal ability more closely matches their true ranking—while incompetent people being exposed to the work of others had no such effect, though training in the skill improved their ability to self-judge, judge others, and at the skill itself.
People, therefore, are unfit to judge their own competence; the only reliable way to get feedback is via actual practice (i.e. if you have some sort of independent metric for your ability, such as success or failure of actual work) or if you have other competent people judge your competence. As you might imagine, this, of course, creates the problem where you have to ask yourself, “Who is actually competent in cryonics?” And the answer is “cryobiologists and people in related disciplines”. And what is THEIR opinion of cyronics?
Quite poor, on the whole. While there are “cryonics specialists” there are no signs of actual competence there as there is no one who can actually revive frozen people, let alone revive frozen people and fix whatever problems they had prior to being frozen. Ergo, they can’t really be viewed as useful judges on the whole because they have shown no signs of actual competence—there is no proof that anyone is competent at cryonics at all.
Dunning-Kruger definitely applies here, and applies in a major way. The closest things to experts are the people working in real scientific disciplines, such as cyrobiology and similar things. These people have real expertise, and they are not exactly best friends with Alcor and similar organizations. In fact, most of them say that it is, at best, well-intended stupidity and at worst a scam.
Name three. Like V_V, I suspect that for all that you glibly allude to ‘cults’ you have no personal experience and you have not acquainted yourself with even a surface summary of the literature, much like you have not bothered to so much as read a cryonics FAQ or book before thinking you have refuted it.
Similar religious movements? How many movements don’t have some concept of life after death? It is very analogous.
I have indeed read papers on cyrobiology and on cryonics, though I could not name them off-hand—indeed, I couldn’t tell you the name of the paper I read on the subject just yesterday, or the others I read earlier this week. I am, on the whole, not very impressed. There are definitely things we can freeze and thaw just fine—embryos and sperm, for instance. We can freeze lots of “lower organisms”. We’ve played around with freezing fish and frogs and various creatures which have adapted to such things.
But freezing mammals? Even reducing mammalian body temperatures to the point where freezing begins is fatal, albeit not immediately; we have revived rats and monkeys and hamsters down to very low temperatures (below 0C) and revived them, but they don’t tend to do very well afterwards, dying on the scale of hours to days. Some organs, such as the heart and kidney, have been frozen and revived—which is cool, to be fair. Well, frozen is the wrong term really—more “preserved at low temperatures”. There was the rabbit kidney which they did vitrify, while the hearts I’ve seen have mostly been reduced to low temperatures without freezing them—though you can apparently freeze and thaw hearts and they’ll work, at least for a while (we figured that out more than half a century ago).
However, a lot of cryobiology is not about things applicable to cryonics—we’re talking taking tissue down to like, −2C, not immersing it in LN2. The vitrified rabbit kidney is interesting for that reason, but unfortunately the rabbit in question only lasted nine days—so while it could keep them up for a while, it did eventually fail. And all the other rabbits they experimented on perished as well.
And it takes even less time to notice that there are long thorough answers to the obvious objections. Your point here is true, but says far more about you than religion or cryonics; after all, many true things like heliocentrism or evolution have superficial easily thought-of objections which have been addressed in depth. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t; the argument from evil is probably the single most obvious argument against Western religions, there are countless replies from theists of various levels of sophistication, and while I don’t think any of them actually work, I also don’t think someone going ‘My mother died! God doesn’t exist!’ is contributing anything whatsoever. What, you think the theists somehow failed to notice that bad things happen? Of course they did notice, so if you want to argue against the existence of God, read up on their response.
The length of an answer has very little to do with its value. Look at Alcor’s many answers—there are plenty of long answers there. Long on hope, that is, short on reality. In fact, being able to answer something succicently is often a sign of actual thought. It is very simple to pontificate and pretend you have a point, it is much more difficult to write a one paragraph answer that is complete. And in this case, the answer SHOULD be simple.
If it was so easy, again, why are you writing a long response?
If you had spent less time being arrogant, it might have occurred to you that I see this sort of flip reaction all the time in which people learn of cryonics and in five seconds think they’ve come up with the perfect objection and refuse to spend any time at all to disconfirm their objection. You are acting exactly like the person who said, “but it’s not profitable to revive crypatients! QED you’re all idiots and suckers”, when literally the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article on ALCOR implies how they attempt to resolve this issue; here’s a link to the discussion: http://lesswrong.com/lw/gh5/cryo_and_social_obligations/8d43
I enjoy how you are calling me arrogant, and yet you still are not answering my question.
At least other people have tried. “Dead people are valuable artifacts! People are excited about Jurassic park, that would totally be a viable business venture, so why not dead people?” Now that is a quick, succicient argument. It makes a reasonable appeal—dead people could be valuable as an attraction in the future.
The problem with that is the idea that it would make you any money at all. The Thirteenth Amendment prohibits owning people, and that kind of puts a major crimp in the idea of a tourist attraction, and given the sheer expense involved, again, you need some sort of parallel technology to get rid of those costs in any case. Humans are also a lot less exciting than dinosaurs are. I’m not going to go to the zoo to see someone from the 17th century, and indeed the idea is morally repugnant. Sure, I might go to ren faires, but let’s face it—ren faires aren’t run by people from the 10th century, they’re run by people from the 21st century for people from the 21st century.
You are comparing the current state of the art (freezing mammals and rabbits) with what may or may not be theoretically possible, potentially centuries down the line.
How long a rabbit survived upon being revived using current methods is besides the point—how long rabbits (and humans) can possibly survive when revived a long time into the future would be more relevant. Potentially no survival would be necessary at all, if the informational state was uploaded to a different hardware substrate. Not postulating magic, just not postulating anything which would contradict our current understanding of the laws of physics—and even that is more of a lower bound.
Concerning the technological feasibility, all we can say is that we can’t say one way or the other how closely a reconstituted / scanned brain would resemble the original person. There is little indication that a high-fidelity reconstruction is in principle impossible. And a supposed impossibility cannot be established by looking at how long rabbits survive using current methods, molecular biology in its more theoretical variants would be more relevant.
So, the jury’s still out for the “technological viability in the future” part. The “would any agent (group of agents) get to the point where it (they) could revive us, and if so, would it (they) want to, and if so, would we want to be revived that way” are different questions. Let’s not muddle the issues.
Few cryonicists expect to be revived if Earth is rendered uninhabitable during World Wars III to X. Or if the facility in which they were stored went bankrupt, and the cadavers thrown out. Or if the facility were destroyed in some natural disaster (building on tectonic fault lines is a dumb long-term plan).
Also, few cryonicists would want to be revived by some uncaring alien civilization stumbling upon our remains, and reanimating us to test the pain endurance of 21st century human specimens. Maybe for whatever reasons resources would be scarce, and revival and retraining frozen Homo-heidelbergensis-equivalents may be prohibited (although it stands to reason that if the capabilities to do so in the first place are there, energy isn’t an issue anymore. There’s plenty around, after all).
There’s a danger of being revived just to serve as some sort of living exhibit, or to be reconfigured into a database, either inert with no consciousness, or forced to relive selectively looped memories over and over (a sort of cryonics-based simulation argument). Most cryonicists would probably count such a successful revival as a failure.
Yet for all that, you mention a US-amendment as if it could be relevant at that future point in time? Historically, the dominating constant has been hard to predict change. There are many future scenarios in which you’d want to have been frozen, and many in which you wouldn’t. It’s not a large monetary investment. Why not? People spend more on experimental cancer treatments, or antibodies that give them a few additional weeks on average.
When I’m in my own galaxy, I’ll think back on you, and maybe construct a best-guess facsimile based on your comments, invested into the body of Statler or Waldorf (which would you prefer?). See you then!
I understood Dunning-Kruger quite well. Dunning-Kruger suggests that, barring outside influence, people will believe themselves to be of above-average ability. Incompetent people will greatly overestimate their capability and understanding, and the ability to judge talent in others was proportional to ability in the skill itself—in other words, people who are incompetent are not only incompetent, but also incapable of judging competence in other people.
Competent people, conversely, overestimate the competence of the incompetent; however, they do have the ability to judge incompetence, so when they are allowed to look at the work of others relative to their own, their estimation of their own personal ability more closely matches their true ranking—while incompetent people being exposed to the work of others had no such effect, though training in the skill improved their ability to self-judge, judge others, and at the skill itself.
People, therefore, are unfit to judge their own competence; the only reliable way to get feedback is via actual practice (i.e. if you have some sort of independent metric for your ability, such as success or failure of actual work) or if you have other competent people judge your competence. As you might imagine, this, of course, creates the problem where you have to ask yourself, “Who is actually competent in cryonics?” And the answer is “cryobiologists and people in related disciplines”. And what is THEIR opinion of cyronics?
Quite poor, on the whole. While there are “cryonics specialists” there are no signs of actual competence there as there is no one who can actually revive frozen people, let alone revive frozen people and fix whatever problems they had prior to being frozen. Ergo, they can’t really be viewed as useful judges on the whole because they have shown no signs of actual competence—there is no proof that anyone is competent at cryonics at all.
Dunning-Kruger definitely applies here, and applies in a major way. The closest things to experts are the people working in real scientific disciplines, such as cyrobiology and similar things. These people have real expertise, and they are not exactly best friends with Alcor and similar organizations. In fact, most of them say that it is, at best, well-intended stupidity and at worst a scam.
Similar religious movements? How many movements don’t have some concept of life after death? It is very analogous.
I have indeed read papers on cyrobiology and on cryonics, though I could not name them off-hand—indeed, I couldn’t tell you the name of the paper I read on the subject just yesterday, or the others I read earlier this week. I am, on the whole, not very impressed. There are definitely things we can freeze and thaw just fine—embryos and sperm, for instance. We can freeze lots of “lower organisms”. We’ve played around with freezing fish and frogs and various creatures which have adapted to such things.
But freezing mammals? Even reducing mammalian body temperatures to the point where freezing begins is fatal, albeit not immediately; we have revived rats and monkeys and hamsters down to very low temperatures (below 0C) and revived them, but they don’t tend to do very well afterwards, dying on the scale of hours to days. Some organs, such as the heart and kidney, have been frozen and revived—which is cool, to be fair. Well, frozen is the wrong term really—more “preserved at low temperatures”. There was the rabbit kidney which they did vitrify, while the hearts I’ve seen have mostly been reduced to low temperatures without freezing them—though you can apparently freeze and thaw hearts and they’ll work, at least for a while (we figured that out more than half a century ago).
However, a lot of cryobiology is not about things applicable to cryonics—we’re talking taking tissue down to like, −2C, not immersing it in LN2. The vitrified rabbit kidney is interesting for that reason, but unfortunately the rabbit in question only lasted nine days—so while it could keep them up for a while, it did eventually fail. And all the other rabbits they experimented on perished as well.
The length of an answer has very little to do with its value. Look at Alcor’s many answers—there are plenty of long answers there. Long on hope, that is, short on reality. In fact, being able to answer something succicently is often a sign of actual thought. It is very simple to pontificate and pretend you have a point, it is much more difficult to write a one paragraph answer that is complete. And in this case, the answer SHOULD be simple.
If it was so easy, again, why are you writing a long response?
I enjoy how you are calling me arrogant, and yet you still are not answering my question.
At least other people have tried. “Dead people are valuable artifacts! People are excited about Jurassic park, that would totally be a viable business venture, so why not dead people?” Now that is a quick, succicient argument. It makes a reasonable appeal—dead people could be valuable as an attraction in the future.
The problem with that is the idea that it would make you any money at all. The Thirteenth Amendment prohibits owning people, and that kind of puts a major crimp in the idea of a tourist attraction, and given the sheer expense involved, again, you need some sort of parallel technology to get rid of those costs in any case. Humans are also a lot less exciting than dinosaurs are. I’m not going to go to the zoo to see someone from the 17th century, and indeed the idea is morally repugnant. Sure, I might go to ren faires, but let’s face it—ren faires aren’t run by people from the 10th century, they’re run by people from the 21st century for people from the 21st century.
You are comparing the current state of the art (freezing mammals and rabbits) with what may or may not be theoretically possible, potentially centuries down the line.
How long a rabbit survived upon being revived using current methods is besides the point—how long rabbits (and humans) can possibly survive when revived a long time into the future would be more relevant. Potentially no survival would be necessary at all, if the informational state was uploaded to a different hardware substrate. Not postulating magic, just not postulating anything which would contradict our current understanding of the laws of physics—and even that is more of a lower bound.
Concerning the technological feasibility, all we can say is that we can’t say one way or the other how closely a reconstituted / scanned brain would resemble the original person. There is little indication that a high-fidelity reconstruction is in principle impossible. And a supposed impossibility cannot be established by looking at how long rabbits survive using current methods, molecular biology in its more theoretical variants would be more relevant.
So, the jury’s still out for the “technological viability in the future” part. The “would any agent (group of agents) get to the point where it (they) could revive us, and if so, would it (they) want to, and if so, would we want to be revived that way” are different questions. Let’s not muddle the issues.
Few cryonicists expect to be revived if Earth is rendered uninhabitable during World Wars III to X. Or if the facility in which they were stored went bankrupt, and the cadavers thrown out. Or if the facility were destroyed in some natural disaster (building on tectonic fault lines is a dumb long-term plan).
Also, few cryonicists would want to be revived by some uncaring alien civilization stumbling upon our remains, and reanimating us to test the pain endurance of 21st century human specimens. Maybe for whatever reasons resources would be scarce, and revival and retraining frozen Homo-heidelbergensis-equivalents may be prohibited (although it stands to reason that if the capabilities to do so in the first place are there, energy isn’t an issue anymore. There’s plenty around, after all).
There’s a danger of being revived just to serve as some sort of living exhibit, or to be reconfigured into a database, either inert with no consciousness, or forced to relive selectively looped memories over and over (a sort of cryonics-based simulation argument). Most cryonicists would probably count such a successful revival as a failure.
Yet for all that, you mention a US-amendment as if it could be relevant at that future point in time? Historically, the dominating constant has been hard to predict change. There are many future scenarios in which you’d want to have been frozen, and many in which you wouldn’t. It’s not a large monetary investment. Why not? People spend more on experimental cancer treatments, or antibodies that give them a few additional weeks on average.
When I’m in my own galaxy, I’ll think back on you, and maybe construct a best-guess facsimile based on your comments, invested into the body of Statler or Waldorf (which would you prefer?). See you then!