By the way, a benchmark I’ve found useful in discussing factual matters or matters with a long pre-existing literature is number of citations and hyperlinks per comment. You’re still batting a zero.
So that means your comment is worthless, and thus can be safely ignored, given your only “citations” do not support yourself in any way and is merely meant to insult me?
In any case, citations are mostly unimportant. I use google and find various articles to support my stances; you can do the same to support yours, but I don’t go REF Fahy et. al. “Physical and biological aspects of renal vitrification” Organogenesis. 2009 Jul-Sep; 5(3): 167–175.
Most of the time, you aren’t going to bother checking my sources anyway, and moreover, you’re asking for negative evidence, which is always a problem. You’re asking for evidence that God does not exist, and rejecting everything but “Hey look, God is sitting here, but he’s not”.
You’re acting like someone who was just told that they don’t have a soul and therefore won’t go to heaven when they die, because heaven doesn’t exist.
You can take ten seconds to see a long list of objections by googling “Cryonics is a scam”. You can go to Alcor and read a paper where a true believer suggests that the odds of revival are, at best, 15%, and that’s assuming magical nanomachines have a 99% chance of existing. You can read the opinions of various experts who point out the problems with ice crystal formation, the toxicity of vitrification chemicals (which would have to be purged prior to revival), the issues of whether microdamage to structures would cause you to die anyway, the issues of whether you can actually revive them, and pointing out that, once you do warm them up, you’ve got a dead body, and all you have to do from there is ressurect the dead. We do know that even short times wtihout oxygen cause irreparable brain damage, and even at cold temperatures, that process does not stop completely—once they’re in LN2, sure, maybe, assuming the process doesn’t destroy them. Or you know, that the process of putting in the chemicals doesn’t cause damage.
The truth is that none of the objections will sway you because you’re a believer.
IF it is possible to do this sort of thing, there is a very, very good chance that it will require a very specific freezing process. A process which does not yet exist.
I’m impressed you’ve failed to notice that LW is maybe a little different from other sites and we have higher standards, and what happens ‘historically’ isn’t terribly relevant.
The problem is that it isn’t, and a cursory search of the internet will tell you that. :\
I was a bit excited to find a site devoted to rationality, and was rather disappointed to learn that no, it wasn’t.
I wrote a little hymn about it a while ago. It starts with “Our AI, who art in the future”, and you can imagine that it goes downhill from there.
In fact, a cursory search of the net showed at least one topic that you guys preemptively banned from discussion because some future AI might find it and then torture you for it. If that isn’t a religious taboo, I don’t know what is.
The singularity is not going to happen. Nanomachines the way that they are popularly imagined will never exist. Cyronics, today, is selling hope and smoke, and is a bad investment. You’ve got people discussing “friendly AI” and similar nonsense, without really understanding that they’re really talking about magic, and that all this philosophizing about it is pretty silly.
I’m good with doing silly things, but people here take them seriously.
Just because you call yourself a rationalist doesn’t make you a rationalist. Being rational is hard for most people to do. But perhaps the most important aspect of being a rationalist is understanding that just because you want something to be true, doesn’t make it true. Understanding that deep in your bones.
Most people will be deeply insulted if you imply that they are irrational. And yet people on the whole do not behave rationally, given the goals they claim to possess.
I understand you are deeply emotionally invested in this. I understand that arguing with you is pointless. But I actually enjoy arguing, so its okay. But how is it for you? If you’ve invested in cryonics, is your brain more or less likely to believe that it is true?
Historical trends are always important, especially when you see obvious similarities. There are obvious and worrisome similarities between basic tenants (ressurrection of the dead, some sort of greatly advanced being who will watch over us (the post-singularity AI or AIs)) and the tenents of religions. You can’t claim “we’re different” without good evidence, and as they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
And all the evidence today points towards cyronics being a very expensive form of burial. There is no extraordinary evidence that it will allow for ressurection in the future. Thus, it is a waste of money and resources you could spend to make today more awesome.
Apparently you missed the point. The point was: stop being arrogant. Think for a freaking second about how obvious an argument might be and at least what the reply might be, if you cannot be arsed to look up actual sources. Do us the courtesy of not just thinking your way to your bottom line of ‘cryonics sucks’ but maybe a step beyond that too.
Maybe you should take your own advice?
I am quite aware that this is upsetting to you. I just told you you’re going to die and be dead forever. It is an unsurprising reaction; a lot of people react with fear to that idea.
But really, there is no evidence cryonics is useful in any way. The argument is “Well, if you’ve rotted away, then you’ve got no chance at all!” Sure. But what if you could spend your money on present-day immortality research? The odds of that paying off are probably much higher than the odds of cryonics paying off. There is a path forward there. We don’t know what causes aging, but we know that many organisms live longer than human beings do, and we may be able to take advantage of that. Technology such as artifical or grown organs may allow us to survive until brain failure. Drugs to treat brain disease may allow us to put off degredation of our brains indefinitely. The list goes on.
That is far more promising than “freeze me and hope for the best”. Heck, if you really wanted to live forever you’d do things to work towards that. If cyronics is truly so important, why aren’t you doing relevant research? Or working towards other things that can help with life extension?
Isn’t that far more rational?
Cryonics is a sucker’s bet. Even if there was a possibility it worked, the odds of it working are far less than other routes to immortality.
Instead, cryonics is just a way to sell people hope. Just as Christians make peace with the idea of death that they will be going to a better place, that they will be okay, Christians avoid death as much as anyone else does. The same is true of cryonics. The rational thing to do, if it is important to avoid dying, is to work towards avoiding it or mitigating it as much as possible. Are you? If the answer is no, is it really so important to you? Or is paying that money for cryonics just a personal way to make peace with death?
You can take ten seconds to see a long list of objections by googling “Cryonics is a scam”. You can go to Alcor and read a paper where a true believer suggests that the odds of revival are, at best, 15%, and that’s assuming magical nanomachines have a 99% chance of existing.
I’ll note here that the average estimated chance among regulars here for cryonics working is actually lower than that, and the difference in how seriously people on Less Wrong tend to take cryonics compared to the general population is less to do with thinking it’s much more likely than most people, and more to do with thinking that a chance of revival on that order is worth taking seriously.
I was a bit excited to find a site devoted to rationality, and was rather disappointed to learn that no, it wasn’t.
I wrote a little hymn about it a while ago. It starts with “Our AI, who art in the future”, and you can imagine that it goes downhill from there.
I’m sorry, what is the intended content here? Because you can write a hymn that parodies strong AI claims that therefore we need to take them less seriously?
In fact, a cursory search of the net showed at least one topic that you guys preemptively banned from discussion because some future AI might find it and then torture you for it. If that isn’t a religious taboo, I don’t know what is.
Many people are not in favor of discussing the basilisk not because of the issue with a potential AI, but because of the danger that mentally vulnerable people will be disturbed by the notion. But in any event, you are pattern matching in an unhelpful way. The fact that something resembles something done by religions doesn’t make it intrinsically wrong. Note for example, that large amounts of computer programming and maintenance look heavily ritualistic if you don’t know what it is.
The singularity is not going to happen. Nanomachines the way that they are popularly imagined will never exist. Cyronics, today, is selling hope and smoke, and is a bad investment. You’ve got people discussing “friendly AI” and similar nonsense, without really understanding that they’re really talking about magic, and that all this philosophizing about it is pretty silly.
So these are all conclusions, not arguments. And speaking as someone who agrees with you on a lot of this stuff, you are being both highly irrational and unnecessarily insulting in how you lay out these claims.
Cryonics is a sucker’s bet. Even if there was a possibility it worked, the odds of it working are far less than other routes to immortality.
What other routes are you comparing it to? You mention a few methods of life-extension, but none are methods likely to add by themselves more than a few centuries at most.
Instead, cryonics is just a way to sell people hope. Just as Christians make peace with the idea of death that they will be going to a better place, that they will be okay, Christians avoid death as much as anyone else does. The same is true of cryonics. The rational thing to do, if it is important to avoid dying, is to work towards avoiding it or mitigating it as much as possible. Are you? If the answer is no, is it really so important to you? Or is paying that money for cryonics just a personal way to make peace with death?
Don’t confuse not having a certain goal set with disagreeing with you about what will most likely accomplish that goal set.
You can read the opinions of various experts who point out the problems with ice crystal formation, the toxicity of vitrification chemicals (which would have to be purged prior to revival), the issues of whether microdamage to structures would cause you to die anyway, the issues of whether you can actually revive them, and pointing out that, once you do warm them up, you’ve got a dead body, and all you have to do from there is ressurect the dead.
You have just declared yourself ignorant of what cryonics is intended to do and screened off whatever value your opinion may otherwise have had.
I was a bit excited to find a site devoted to rationality, and was rather disappointed to learn that no, it wasn’t.
I invite you to leave and find another place where the style of thought is more in accord with that of your own contributions. (I strongly oppose any attempts to make lesswrong more like that.)
So that means your comment is worthless, and thus can be safely ignored, given your only “citations” do not support yourself in any way and is merely meant to insult me?
In any case, citations are mostly unimportant. I use google and find various articles to support my stances; you can do the same to support yours, but I don’t go REF Fahy et. al. “Physical and biological aspects of renal vitrification” Organogenesis. 2009 Jul-Sep; 5(3): 167–175.
Most of the time, you aren’t going to bother checking my sources anyway, and moreover, you’re asking for negative evidence, which is always a problem. You’re asking for evidence that God does not exist, and rejecting everything but “Hey look, God is sitting here, but he’s not”.
You’re acting like someone who was just told that they don’t have a soul and therefore won’t go to heaven when they die, because heaven doesn’t exist.
You can take ten seconds to see a long list of objections by googling “Cryonics is a scam”. You can go to Alcor and read a paper where a true believer suggests that the odds of revival are, at best, 15%, and that’s assuming magical nanomachines have a 99% chance of existing. You can read the opinions of various experts who point out the problems with ice crystal formation, the toxicity of vitrification chemicals (which would have to be purged prior to revival), the issues of whether microdamage to structures would cause you to die anyway, the issues of whether you can actually revive them, and pointing out that, once you do warm them up, you’ve got a dead body, and all you have to do from there is ressurect the dead. We do know that even short times wtihout oxygen cause irreparable brain damage, and even at cold temperatures, that process does not stop completely—once they’re in LN2, sure, maybe, assuming the process doesn’t destroy them. Or you know, that the process of putting in the chemicals doesn’t cause damage.
The truth is that none of the objections will sway you because you’re a believer.
IF it is possible to do this sort of thing, there is a very, very good chance that it will require a very specific freezing process. A process which does not yet exist.
The problem is that it isn’t, and a cursory search of the internet will tell you that. :\
I was a bit excited to find a site devoted to rationality, and was rather disappointed to learn that no, it wasn’t.
I wrote a little hymn about it a while ago. It starts with “Our AI, who art in the future”, and you can imagine that it goes downhill from there.
In fact, a cursory search of the net showed at least one topic that you guys preemptively banned from discussion because some future AI might find it and then torture you for it. If that isn’t a religious taboo, I don’t know what is.
The singularity is not going to happen. Nanomachines the way that they are popularly imagined will never exist. Cyronics, today, is selling hope and smoke, and is a bad investment. You’ve got people discussing “friendly AI” and similar nonsense, without really understanding that they’re really talking about magic, and that all this philosophizing about it is pretty silly.
I’m good with doing silly things, but people here take them seriously.
Just because you call yourself a rationalist doesn’t make you a rationalist. Being rational is hard for most people to do. But perhaps the most important aspect of being a rationalist is understanding that just because you want something to be true, doesn’t make it true. Understanding that deep in your bones.
Most people will be deeply insulted if you imply that they are irrational. And yet people on the whole do not behave rationally, given the goals they claim to possess.
I understand you are deeply emotionally invested in this. I understand that arguing with you is pointless. But I actually enjoy arguing, so its okay. But how is it for you? If you’ve invested in cryonics, is your brain more or less likely to believe that it is true?
Historical trends are always important, especially when you see obvious similarities. There are obvious and worrisome similarities between basic tenants (ressurrection of the dead, some sort of greatly advanced being who will watch over us (the post-singularity AI or AIs)) and the tenents of religions. You can’t claim “we’re different” without good evidence, and as they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
And all the evidence today points towards cyronics being a very expensive form of burial. There is no extraordinary evidence that it will allow for ressurection in the future. Thus, it is a waste of money and resources you could spend to make today more awesome.
Maybe you should take your own advice?
I am quite aware that this is upsetting to you. I just told you you’re going to die and be dead forever. It is an unsurprising reaction; a lot of people react with fear to that idea.
But really, there is no evidence cryonics is useful in any way. The argument is “Well, if you’ve rotted away, then you’ve got no chance at all!” Sure. But what if you could spend your money on present-day immortality research? The odds of that paying off are probably much higher than the odds of cryonics paying off. There is a path forward there. We don’t know what causes aging, but we know that many organisms live longer than human beings do, and we may be able to take advantage of that. Technology such as artifical or grown organs may allow us to survive until brain failure. Drugs to treat brain disease may allow us to put off degredation of our brains indefinitely. The list goes on.
That is far more promising than “freeze me and hope for the best”. Heck, if you really wanted to live forever you’d do things to work towards that. If cyronics is truly so important, why aren’t you doing relevant research? Or working towards other things that can help with life extension?
Isn’t that far more rational?
Cryonics is a sucker’s bet. Even if there was a possibility it worked, the odds of it working are far less than other routes to immortality.
Instead, cryonics is just a way to sell people hope. Just as Christians make peace with the idea of death that they will be going to a better place, that they will be okay, Christians avoid death as much as anyone else does. The same is true of cryonics. The rational thing to do, if it is important to avoid dying, is to work towards avoiding it or mitigating it as much as possible. Are you? If the answer is no, is it really so important to you? Or is paying that money for cryonics just a personal way to make peace with death?
I’ll note here that the average estimated chance among regulars here for cryonics working is actually lower than that, and the difference in how seriously people on Less Wrong tend to take cryonics compared to the general population is less to do with thinking it’s much more likely than most people, and more to do with thinking that a chance of revival on that order is worth taking seriously.
I’m sorry, what is the intended content here? Because you can write a hymn that parodies strong AI claims that therefore we need to take them less seriously?
Many people are not in favor of discussing the basilisk not because of the issue with a potential AI, but because of the danger that mentally vulnerable people will be disturbed by the notion. But in any event, you are pattern matching in an unhelpful way. The fact that something resembles something done by religions doesn’t make it intrinsically wrong. Note for example, that large amounts of computer programming and maintenance look heavily ritualistic if you don’t know what it is.
So these are all conclusions, not arguments. And speaking as someone who agrees with you on a lot of this stuff, you are being both highly irrational and unnecessarily insulting in how you lay out these claims.
What other routes are you comparing it to? You mention a few methods of life-extension, but none are methods likely to add by themselves more than a few centuries at most.
Don’t confuse not having a certain goal set with disagreeing with you about what will most likely accomplish that goal set.
You have just declared yourself ignorant of what cryonics is intended to do and screened off whatever value your opinion may otherwise have had.
I invite you to leave and find another place where the style of thought is more in accord with that of your own contributions. (I strongly oppose any attempts to make lesswrong more like that.)