This claim would require citation and such a citation does not exist.
A proper test of that claim would require a poll, but since most physicists are not signed up for cryonics, don’t make public statements endorsing it, and when specifically interviewed about it say they don’t believe cyronics works, it seems fair to infer that most physicists indeed don’t believe cyronics works.
Most physicists have not thought about the subject one way or the other.
What makes you believe that? Cryonics is relatively well known among scientifically educated audiences. it’s even the main plot device of a tv show aimed at general audiences (Futurama). Moreover, physicists are usually atheists, therefore in principle they should have no religous objection to cryonics.
Moreover, most physicists (those who don’t have particular expertise in information theory) are not particularly qualified to evaluate the subject except, of course, as intelligent laymen.
Seriously, where do you think information theory comes from? And do you actually even know what information theory is about? Because people here seem to be using the term as a buzzword without actually using any information theory in their arguments.
t is possible to find neuroscientists who are not aware of their own incompetence outside their area of expertise and who claim that cryonics cannot work.
Except that cryonics is actually in their area of expertise. And in the area of expertise of cryobiologists (the people who cryopreserve tissues in a way that can be shown to actually work). What do cryobiologists say about cryonics? I bet you already know the answer...
The private_messaging account is one of the many identified sockpuppets of a persistent troll.
What makes you believe that? Cryonics is relatively well known among scientifically educated audiences. it’s even the main plot device of a tv show aimed at general audiences (Futurama).
This physicist has never heard anyone talk about cryonics in meatspace, and assumed that the Futurama thing was fictional until reading Less Wrong. (Also, Fry was alive when he got frozen.)
Moreover, physicists are usually atheists, therefore in principle they should have no religous objection to cryonics.
For some not-very-large value of “usually”. Where I am, physicists aren’t that less likely to be religious than random people the same age and geographic provenance (but it’s probably different elsewhere).
This physicist has never heard anyone talk about cryonics in meatspace, and assumed that the Futurama thing was fictional until reading Less Wrong. (Also, Fry was alive when he got frozen.)
How old were you when you started reading Less Wrong?
For some not-very-large value of “usually”. Where I am, physicists aren’t that less likely to be religious than random people the same age and geographic provenance (but it’s probably different elsewhere).
That would be surprising. Do you have any reference?
How old were you when you started reading Less Wrong?
24. Why?
That would be surprising. Do you have any reference?
No statistics about that, I’m afraid. You’d have to accept my anecdata. I have met at least a dozen Catholic physicists, many of whom engaged in various kinds of Catholic associations; that’s somewhere around half the physicists I know well enough to know their religious stance. (Also, [REDACTED].)
That’s less surprising if you know that the person most people where I’m from think of first when they hear “physicist” is this guy.
What makes you believe that? Cryonics is relatively well known among scientifically educated audiences. it’s even the main plot device of a tv show aimed at general audiences (Futurama).
You seem to be suggesting that the knowledge physicists have about cryonics is based on their generalist knowledge as educated layment. You further observe that much of this knowledge comes from fictional evidence in popular culture. I heartily agree.
Seriously, where do you think information theory comes from?
Physics and mathematics. My comment doesn’t suggest otherwise. This does not mean that all physicists are particularly well versed in it when it is not their area of expertise.
Except that cryonics is actually in their area of expertise.
This is your core confusion. Reasoning from this premise would indeed lead you to the conclusion you reach. Given that I reject this premise it follows that I can gain little information from all the chains of reasoning that you base upon it. Neuroscientists are not experts in extracting one to one mappings from preserved brain tissue to individual identities. This is why the expected behaviour of neuroscientsists is to do what experts nearly always do when thinking about things outside their field—pattern match to the nearest thing within their field and overestimate the relevance of their knowledge.
Irrelevant ad hominem.
False. You have the common misunderstanding of what that logical fallacy refers to. If my argument was “this is a confirmed troll therefore its words are false” it would be an ad hominem fallacy (mind you, a slightly weakend variant would hold even then, to whatever extent personal testimony of the troll was considered evidence). This was not argument in that quote. It is highly relevant to why I believe it was necessary to excuse myself for the act of replying to disruption attempts.
You seem to be suggesting that the knowledge physicists have about cryonics is based on their generalist knowledge as educated layment. You further observe that much of this knowledge comes from fictional evidence in popular culture. I heartily agree.
The existence of cryonics is common knowledge. You just need an internet connection to look up the details.
Physics and mathematics. My comment doesn’t suggest otherwise. This does not mean that all physicists are particularly well versed in it when it is not their area of expertise.
Still I expect them to be more proficient in it than random people who use the term as a buzzword over the interwebs.
Neuroscientists are not experts in extracting one to one mappings from preserved brain tissue to individual identities.
While the people who would keep you on dry ice for two weeks obviously are. You are making classical crackpot excuses to handwave away expert knowledge. I don’t think there is any productive way for us to continue this discussion.
While the people who would keep you on dry ice for two weeks obviously are.
Um… no? I seem to recall questioning that choice elsewhere on this thread and giving partial support to another (MichaelAnisimov) who claimed in colourful terms that it is a critical failure.
You are making classical crackpot excuses to handwave away expert knowledge.
No I’m not. I’m disagreeing with you about which people are experts. You are not an expert at choosing appropriate experts to defer to. You are appealing to absurdly irrelevant authority. “Expert” status and prestige is not transferable across domains. Or at least it shouldn’t be for those who are interested in attaining accurate beliefs.
I don’t think there is any productive way for us to continue this discussion.
Obviously not. Our disagreement about how how rational thinking works is rather fundamental, with all that entails.
A proper test of that claim would require a poll, but since most physicists are not signed up for cryonics, don’t make public statements endorsing it, and when specifically interviewed about it say they don’t believe cyronics works, it seems fair to infer that most physicists indeed don’t believe cyronics works.
Yeah … you’re simply wrong here, Wedrifid.
physicists are usually atheists
Really? I thought they were merely disproportionately non-religious?
Except that cryonics is actually in their area of expertise. And in the area of expertise of cryobiologists (the people who cryopreserve tissues in a way that can be shown to actually work).
Is it? Techniques for minimising the damage might be within their purview, but the possibility of reconstruction in the future?
Actually, no, technically that would be a subset of their field. But that isn’t the same as everyone in that field being an expert in it. Or even most of them.
Really? I thought they were merely disproportionately non-religious?
I was using atheist as a synonym of irreligious, which was an imprecision, but according to the references I can find, scientists are indeed mostly irreligious or atheists: ”Scientists and in particular eminent scientists are mostly atheists, perhaps the only demographic in the West in which this occurs.”—Demographics of atheism
Techniques for minimising the damage might be within their purview, but the possibility of reconstruction in the future?
I suppose nobody is really an expert in technologies that don’t yet exist anywhere outside sci-fi books, but cryobiologists and neurobiologists are the people best equipped to undestand the type and extent of damage that crypreservation causes to nervous tissue and the effect this damage is likely to have on personal identity.
So was I. I was under the impression physicists were only more irreligious than baseline, rather than most of them being irreligious; although “top” scientists are much more so.
Trying to look up the actual statistics … OK, a lot of it is behind paywalls and frankly I’m too lazy to do much beyond a quick Google, but Wikipedia claims scientists in general are about equal numbers atheists, agnostics and theists (i.e. 2/3rds non-theist.) And physicists are just under that, apparently (29%). But I can’t read the actual sources for these vaguely-worded assertions (they have some, though!)
The most—practically the only, in popular discussions of this—cited study on this topic seems to be this, which, naturally, isn’t much good (short, though.)
So going with WPs figure … eh, it’s a bit higher than I expected offhand, so hey, new data! I wouldn’t call that “usually”, but ultimately that’s a semantic question of usage. I don’t attach huge confidence to Wikipedia’s figures, though I would say they’re in the right ballpark; do you by any chance have better ones?
We may be getting offtopic, though, since I’m not sure how much bearing atheism has on reactions to cryonics in practice.
I suppose nobody is really an expert in technologies that don’t yet exist anywhere outside sci-fi books, but cryobiologists and neurobiologists are the people best equipped to undestand the type and extent of damage that crypreservation causes to nervous tissue and the effect this damage is likely to have on personal identity.
At risk of repeating myself: determining whether damage has passed information-theoretic death falls under the purview of physics and cryobiology, among a variety of other fields. That is not at all the same thing as saying that it is “in the area of expertise” of every physicist and cryobiologist, and thus a (hypothetical) survey of them would be “expert opinion”.
Frankly, I suspect I’ve learned all I can from this discussion. I’ll read your reply in case I’m wrong, but I’m tapping out.
At risk of repeating myself: determining whether damage has passed information-theoretic death falls under the purview of physics and cryobiology, among a variety of other fields. That is not at all the same thing as saying that it is “in the area of expertise” of every physicist and cryobiologist, and thus a (hypothetical) survey of them would be “expert opinion”.
I agree with what you are saying here and think you’ve struck the right balance between acknowledging genuine competence and expecting universal expertise over general fields of knowledge. Elsewhere and at a different time it might be worth having a conversation about how to select experts in subjects similar to this one. There is something of a recursive problem in as much as it requires knowledge to know which experts are the ones that are relevant or knowledge to know which person to ask-which-people-should-be-asked. Different beliefs about how to choose authorities to believe seems to be a huge source of disagreement over a variety of problems and frequently results in “reference class tennis”.
It seems that you are venturing into No true Scotsman territory:
Clearly you can divide any research field in sub-fields and sub-sub-fields. You could even try to argue that nobody is an expert in anything they haven’t pubished a scientific paper on (and even then, maybe the paper had multiple authors and Author 1 was not an expert in what Author 2 did, and the referees who did the peer review weren’t really experts, and so on...), but I don’t think that would lead to a viable concept of expertise.
Realistically, we expect researchers within any relatively self-contained field (such as neurobiology or cryobiology) to understand the general principles and issues of their field well enough to tell potentially viable scientific and technological ideas from fringe stuff unlikely to work and outright crackpottery.
Moreover, we expect scientists to be accurate in estimating the level of their own understanding within their field (or at least err predominantly on the side of underconfidence, as per Dunning–Kruger ). Therefore, when multiple scientists independently make a claim about something within their field, barring evidence to the contrary, it seems fair to assume that they know what they are talking about.
It seems that you are venturing into No true Scotsman territory:
It seems like you’re doing exactly the same thing you did before: confusing subsets with their parent sets. A subset of various fields would, I assume, have enough relevant expertise to debunk cryonics; these individuals are, traditionally, distinguished from laymen with PHDs by their arguments.
What I observe, however, is that most people, including those in the referenced fields, have only the vaguest position on cryonics picked up from pop-culture. If you’re lucky, something like “those idiots spend a fortune on con artists who tell them freezing a body means it can be revived after Science develops a cure for whatever killed them.”
Most “experts” are not, in fact, any such thing; and most people, expert and non-, have not considered the possibility in any detail. The fact that physicists have not flocked to cryonics providers is not in any sense strong evidence that they possess evidence we don’t.
What I observe, however, is that most people, including those in the referenced fields, have only the vaguest position on cryonics picked up from pop-culture. If you’re lucky, something like “those idiots spend a fortune on con artists who tell them freezing a body means it can be revived after Science develops a cure for whatever killed them.”
Common sense positions aren’t necessarily wrong: any astrogeologist will agree that the Moon is indeed not made of green cheese.
Anyway, comments by “kalla724”, who identifies him/herself as a neuroscientist (I can’t verify that, but I have no reason to believe he/she is lying) seem quite detailed, and PZ Myers, an evolutionary biologist specialized in the nervous system, also made a technical comment against cryonics. The Society for Cryobiology, which was initially sympatetic towards cryonics and included cryonicists as their members, later formally distanced themselves from the practice and even banned cryonicists from being members. Is their position on cryonics just vaguely picked up from pop-culture?
So why aren’t more scientists writing detailed debunkings of cryonics? Well, one of the house rules of the scientific community is that the burden of providing evidence lies on who is making the claim. Most scientists will not invest time and effort to debunk every detail of arguments in the form of “you can’t prove this doesn’t work”. At least not until those who make these claim generate enough noise in the arena of public opinion and start political lobbying. At that point, scientists may feel compelled to debunk as a form of civic duty.
The fact that physicists have not flocked to cryonics providers is not in any sense strong evidence that they possess evidence we don’t.
No, but the fact that neurobiologists and cryobiologists haven’t flocked to cryonics, and in particular cryobiologists have flocked away from it, implies that according to the best available scientifc understanding of the subject, cryonics is unlikely to work.
A proper test of that claim would require a poll, but since most physicists are not signed up for cryonics, don’t make public statements endorsing it, and when specifically interviewed about it say they don’t believe cyronics works, it seems fair to infer that most physicists indeed don’t believe cyronics works.
What makes you believe that? Cryonics is relatively well known among scientifically educated audiences. it’s even the main plot device of a tv show aimed at general audiences (Futurama).
Moreover, physicists are usually atheists, therefore in principle they should have no religous objection to cryonics.
Seriously, where do you think information theory comes from? And do you actually even know what information theory is about? Because people here seem to be using the term as a buzzword without actually using any information theory in their arguments.
Except that cryonics is actually in their area of expertise. And in the area of expertise of cryobiologists (the people who cryopreserve tissues in a way that can be shown to actually work). What do cryobiologists say about cryonics? I bet you already know the answer...
Irrelevant ad hominem.
This physicist has never heard anyone talk about cryonics in meatspace, and assumed that the Futurama thing was fictional until reading Less Wrong. (Also, Fry was alive when he got frozen.)
For some not-very-large value of “usually”. Where I am, physicists aren’t that less likely to be religious than random people the same age and geographic provenance (but it’s probably different elsewhere).
How old were you when you started reading Less Wrong?
That would be surprising. Do you have any reference?
24. Why?
No statistics about that, I’m afraid. You’d have to accept my anecdata. I have met at least a dozen Catholic physicists, many of whom engaged in various kinds of Catholic associations; that’s somewhere around half the physicists I know well enough to know their religious stance. (Also, [REDACTED].)
That’s less surprising if you know that the person most people where I’m from think of first when they hear “physicist” is this guy.
Because the younger you started reading Less Wrong the higher the probability that you were first exposed to its common topics by it.
You seem to be suggesting that the knowledge physicists have about cryonics is based on their generalist knowledge as educated layment. You further observe that much of this knowledge comes from fictional evidence in popular culture. I heartily agree.
Physics and mathematics. My comment doesn’t suggest otherwise. This does not mean that all physicists are particularly well versed in it when it is not their area of expertise.
This is your core confusion. Reasoning from this premise would indeed lead you to the conclusion you reach. Given that I reject this premise it follows that I can gain little information from all the chains of reasoning that you base upon it. Neuroscientists are not experts in extracting one to one mappings from preserved brain tissue to individual identities. This is why the expected behaviour of neuroscientsists is to do what experts nearly always do when thinking about things outside their field—pattern match to the nearest thing within their field and overestimate the relevance of their knowledge.
False. You have the common misunderstanding of what that logical fallacy refers to. If my argument was “this is a confirmed troll therefore its words are false” it would be an ad hominem fallacy (mind you, a slightly weakend variant would hold even then, to whatever extent personal testimony of the troll was considered evidence). This was not argument in that quote. It is highly relevant to why I believe it was necessary to excuse myself for the act of replying to disruption attempts.
The existence of cryonics is common knowledge. You just need an internet connection to look up the details.
Still I expect them to be more proficient in it than random people who use the term as a buzzword over the interwebs.
While the people who would keep you on dry ice for two weeks obviously are.
You are making classical crackpot excuses to handwave away expert knowledge. I don’t think there is any productive way for us to continue this discussion.
Um… no? I seem to recall questioning that choice elsewhere on this thread and giving partial support to another (MichaelAnisimov) who claimed in colourful terms that it is a critical failure.
No I’m not. I’m disagreeing with you about which people are experts. You are not an expert at choosing appropriate experts to defer to. You are appealing to absurdly irrelevant authority. “Expert” status and prestige is not transferable across domains. Or at least it shouldn’t be for those who are interested in attaining accurate beliefs.
Obviously not. Our disagreement about how how rational thinking works is rather fundamental, with all that entails.
Yeah … you’re simply wrong here, Wedrifid.
Really? I thought they were merely disproportionately non-religious?
Is it? Techniques for minimising the damage might be within their purview, but the possibility of reconstruction in the future?
Actually, no, technically that would be a subset of their field. But that isn’t the same as everyone in that field being an expert in it. Or even most of them.
I was using atheist as a synonym of irreligious, which was an imprecision, but according to the references I can find, scientists are indeed mostly irreligious or atheists:
”Scientists and in particular eminent scientists are mostly atheists, perhaps the only demographic in the West in which this occurs.”—Demographics of atheism
I suppose nobody is really an expert in technologies that don’t yet exist anywhere outside sci-fi books, but cryobiologists and neurobiologists are the people best equipped to undestand the type and extent of damage that crypreservation causes to nervous tissue and the effect this damage is likely to have on personal identity.
So was I. I was under the impression physicists were only more irreligious than baseline, rather than most of them being irreligious; although “top” scientists are much more so.
Trying to look up the actual statistics … OK, a lot of it is behind paywalls and frankly I’m too lazy to do much beyond a quick Google, but Wikipedia claims scientists in general are about equal numbers atheists, agnostics and theists (i.e. 2/3rds non-theist.) And physicists are just under that, apparently (29%). But I can’t read the actual sources for these vaguely-worded assertions (they have some, though!)
The most—practically the only, in popular discussions of this—cited study on this topic seems to be this, which, naturally, isn’t much good (short, though.)
So going with WPs figure … eh, it’s a bit higher than I expected offhand, so hey, new data! I wouldn’t call that “usually”, but ultimately that’s a semantic question of usage. I don’t attach huge confidence to Wikipedia’s figures, though I would say they’re in the right ballpark; do you by any chance have better ones?
We may be getting offtopic, though, since I’m not sure how much bearing atheism has on reactions to cryonics in practice.
[section split off into separate comment.]
At risk of repeating myself: determining whether damage has passed information-theoretic death falls under the purview of physics and cryobiology, among a variety of other fields. That is not at all the same thing as saying that it is “in the area of expertise” of every physicist and cryobiologist, and thus a (hypothetical) survey of them would be “expert opinion”.
Frankly, I suspect I’ve learned all I can from this discussion. I’ll read your reply in case I’m wrong, but I’m tapping out.
I agree with what you are saying here and think you’ve struck the right balance between acknowledging genuine competence and expecting universal expertise over general fields of knowledge. Elsewhere and at a different time it might be worth having a conversation about how to select experts in subjects similar to this one. There is something of a recursive problem in as much as it requires knowledge to know which experts are the ones that are relevant or knowledge to know which person to ask-which-people-should-be-asked. Different beliefs about how to choose authorities to believe seems to be a huge source of disagreement over a variety of problems and frequently results in “reference class tennis”.
It seems that you are venturing into No true Scotsman territory:
Clearly you can divide any research field in sub-fields and sub-sub-fields. You could even try to argue that nobody is an expert in anything they haven’t pubished a scientific paper on (and even then, maybe the paper had multiple authors and Author 1 was not an expert in what Author 2 did, and the referees who did the peer review weren’t really experts, and so on...), but I don’t think that would lead to a viable concept of expertise.
Realistically, we expect researchers within any relatively self-contained field (such as neurobiology or cryobiology) to understand the general principles and issues of their field well enough to tell potentially viable scientific and technological ideas from fringe stuff unlikely to work and outright crackpottery.
Moreover, we expect scientists to be accurate in estimating the level of their own understanding within their field (or at least err predominantly on the side of underconfidence, as per Dunning–Kruger ). Therefore, when multiple scientists independently make a claim about something within their field, barring evidence to the contrary, it seems fair to assume that they know what they are talking about.
It seems like you’re doing exactly the same thing you did before: confusing subsets with their parent sets. A subset of various fields would, I assume, have enough relevant expertise to debunk cryonics; these individuals are, traditionally, distinguished from laymen with PHDs by their arguments.
What I observe, however, is that most people, including those in the referenced fields, have only the vaguest position on cryonics picked up from pop-culture. If you’re lucky, something like “those idiots spend a fortune on con artists who tell them freezing a body means it can be revived after Science develops a cure for whatever killed them.”
Most “experts” are not, in fact, any such thing; and most people, expert and non-, have not considered the possibility in any detail. The fact that physicists have not flocked to cryonics providers is not in any sense strong evidence that they possess evidence we don’t.
Tapping out now.
Common sense positions aren’t necessarily wrong: any astrogeologist will agree that the Moon is indeed not made of green cheese.
Anyway, comments by “kalla724”, who identifies him/herself as a neuroscientist (I can’t verify that, but I have no reason to believe he/she is lying) seem quite detailed, and PZ Myers, an evolutionary biologist specialized in the nervous system, also made a technical comment against cryonics.
The Society for Cryobiology, which was initially sympatetic towards cryonics and included cryonicists as their members, later formally distanced themselves from the practice and even banned cryonicists from being members. Is their position on cryonics just vaguely picked up from pop-culture?
So why aren’t more scientists writing detailed debunkings of cryonics? Well, one of the house rules of the scientific community is that the burden of providing evidence lies on who is making the claim. Most scientists will not invest time and effort to debunk every detail of arguments in the form of “you can’t prove this doesn’t work”.
At least not until those who make these claim generate enough noise in the arena of public opinion and start political lobbying. At that point, scientists may feel compelled to debunk as a form of civic duty.
No, but the fact that neurobiologists and cryobiologists haven’t flocked to cryonics, and in particular cryobiologists have flocked away from it, implies that according to the best available scientifc understanding of the subject, cryonics is unlikely to work.
Bye.