It’s just not something I feel comfortable doing to a small child; sending them someplace I haven’t been and can’t imagine.
If your children were about to leave for a strange country without you—or for that matter with you, to some place that none of you had ever been—would you, in your pity, shoot them?
WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE? WHY IS YOUR BRAIN NOT PROCESSING THIS? IT’S YOUR KIDS’ FUCKING LIVES NOT A FAIRY TALE YOU’RE WRITING. You don’t get to be uncomfortable with the fairy tale and so refuse to write it. All you can do is kill your kids. That’s it. That’s all refusal means.
The visceral reaction to “kill your kids” comes from imagining that you’re actually killing them, not letting them go about a normal life. You can argue that it comes down to the same thing, but if they were really the same thing, you could use the less emotionally-loaded language.
What you’re saying: What kind of terrible parent lets their kids live a life slightly better than they had?
Mere framing, depending simply on what your brain thinks is normal. Visit a convention of cryonicists and talk to the kids signed up for cryonics. Those parents wouldn’t think very highly of themselves if they didn’t pay to sign up their kids. If their children died and were lost, they would hold themselves at fault. They’re right.
(The obvious metaphor—so obvious, in fact, that it is not even a metaphor—is withholding lifesaving medical care. Consider how we feel about parents who refuse to treat their kid’s cancer, for example.)
Exactly. Or “What kind of parent settles for letting their kids have merely a slightly better life than they had when a dramatically better life might be possible?”
The world is largely a pretty normal place. I’ve lived in Africa and Europe and have spent time in Central America and almost every type of place in the United States. I feel like I could begin to assess the risk to some extent.
What do I know about a future with alien minds? I thought it was you who argued that we can’t possibly know their motives and values.
(Take the horrible/awfulness of me wanting to kill my kids and project that onto the future society that might revive them. If it’s in me, why can’t it be in them?)
Your children are standing in front of the boat. You can send them on the boat. You can go with them on the boat. Or you can cut their throats. That’s it. There’s nothing else.
I hand you the knife.
What do you do?
I think I’m starting to understand what the absence of clicking is. People who click process problems as if they’re in the real world. If they wouldn’t cut their child’s throat, then they sign their kid up for cryonics.
People who don’t click don’t process the problem like it’s the real world. Strange reactions rise up in them, fears of the unknown, fears of the known, and they react to these fears by running away within the landscape of their minds, and somewhere on the outside words come out of their lips like “But who knows what will happen? How can I send my kids into that?” It’s an expression of that inner fear, an expression of that running away, words coming out of the lips that match up to what’s going on inside their heads somehow… the dread of losing control, the feeling of not understanding, the horror of thinking about mortality, all of these are expressed in a flinch away from the uncomfortable thought and put stumblingly into words.
So they kill their children, because they aren’t processing a real world, they’re processing words connected to words, ways of flinching and running away and giving vent to those odd internal feelings.
And the clickers are standing in front of that boat.
Yes, I’m not a “clicker”. I realize this wasn’t addressed to me, but about me, but I don’t see how this should make me feel ashamed or even inadequate. I need to make ethical/moral decisions and I have no choice but to think through them on my own and make my own decision. When I was 16, I was certain that Proof by Induction would not work, and ever since I understood that it did work, I’ve never claimed certainty based on intuition. However, some arrogance remains in that if something doesn’t convince me, I think: why should I be convinced, if I’m not convinced? I haven’t had any feedback from life that my ability to make decisions isn’t working. I have some problems, but they don’t seem related in any way to not clicking. (Well, maybe I need to “click” on you guys just being too culturally different from me.)
I wonder if in response to your hypothetical you expect a reasonable me to suddenly realize, “oh no! I would never kill them!” and thus find the contradiction in my far-mode reasoning about cryonics. But I would. (Filling in drastic and dire reasons for why the children were being taken on a boat against my will.) So would you, I think, slip a deadly but painless pill to a young boy about to be tortured and killed in a religious ceremony if you were certain it was going to happen. Perhaps you were trying to identify an ethical failing: that at one probability of risk I “let them” live, but at a higher level I arbitrarily, cruelly kill them. I don’t think even this is correct; I don’t know where to begin to know how to reason where the ‘killing’ probability would be, and don’t claim that I do. I only know that it would be an agonizing thing for a parent to ever have to decide, but one they can’t escape from just by glibly pretending such scenarios cannot happen, if the scenario does happen.
I submit that I’m an open-minded and curious person that isn’t afraid of new ideas. (I might be afraid of a lion, but I’m not afraid of thinking about lions.) One problem that I seem to have – though I actually like it – is that I tend to forget what my reasoning on any topic is after a while, and I’m more or less a blank slate again. If I have a negative view of cryonics, when I never even heard of it outside of LW, I think it is because I found some inconsistency in your own world view about it.
For example, it hadn’t really occurred to me at first that ‘somebody strange’ might revive my daughter. My concerns were “near-concerns” – how in the world would I ever get an ambulance in time, much less get her frozen in time, in this backwater place I live in where they aren’t even competent enough to insert a child catheter correctly? But then I read several times this suspiciously repetitive chant that ‘they’re not worried’ about negative-value futures because being revived would select for positive futures.
Well, that’s clearly not dependable optimism. We might get revived just because they want to cut down on energy costs in Arizona, and keeping 20 million people frozen takes a lot of power. Maybe they have a penchant for realistic theater and want to simulate the Holocaust with real non-genetically modified humans.
In my mind, previous to hearing the chant, was that all of these scenarios were unlikely because the world is normal. Obama and byrnema and Joe 6-pack and maybe Eliezer have children, and then their children have children, and then the children of these revive us and we live in a world that is essentially the same or somewhat better. But when I process people talking about the set of possible futures like it’s actually really large enough to include all kinds of horrors with non-negligible probability, then unwarranted optimism in the direction of the probability of something I or they know nothing about does not comfort me.
That is the outcome of the group applying epistemic hygiene to only arguments that lead to conclusions they disagree with. The bad arguments for the views they agree with, left untouched, will sway a person like me who does not think in a linear way, but organically assimilates assumptions and hypotheses as I encounter them.
Your description of not-clicking sounds functionally similar to what Amanda Baggs calls ‘widgets’, though she uses the term in a more political than personal context.
If your children were about to leave for a strange country without you—or for that matter with you, to some place that none of you had ever been—would you, in your pity, shoot them?
WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE? WHY IS YOUR BRAIN NOT PROCESSING THIS? IT’S YOUR KIDS’ FUCKING LIVES NOT A FAIRY TALE YOU’RE WRITING. You don’t get to be uncomfortable with the fairy tale and so refuse to write it. All you can do is kill your kids. That’s it. That’s all refusal means.
The visceral reaction to “kill your kids” comes from imagining that you’re actually killing them, not letting them go about a normal life. You can argue that it comes down to the same thing, but if they were really the same thing, you could use the less emotionally-loaded language.
What you’re saying: What kind of terrible parent lets their kids live a life slightly better than they had?
Mere framing, depending simply on what your brain thinks is normal. Visit a convention of cryonicists and talk to the kids signed up for cryonics. Those parents wouldn’t think very highly of themselves if they didn’t pay to sign up their kids. If their children died and were lost, they would hold themselves at fault. They’re right.
(The obvious metaphor—so obvious, in fact, that it is not even a metaphor—is withholding lifesaving medical care. Consider how we feel about parents who refuse to treat their kid’s cancer, for example.)
Yes, that is indeed the analogy—pardon me, classification—that I was looking for.
Huh? How about:
seems more fair.
Not quite. If my phrasing was confusing, try instead:
Exactly. Or “What kind of parent settles for letting their kids have merely a slightly better life than they had when a dramatically better life might be possible?”
The world is largely a pretty normal place. I’ve lived in Africa and Europe and have spent time in Central America and almost every type of place in the United States. I feel like I could begin to assess the risk to some extent.
What do I know about a future with alien minds? I thought it was you who argued that we can’t possibly know their motives and values.
(Take the horrible/awfulness of me wanting to kill my kids and project that onto the future society that might revive them. If it’s in me, why can’t it be in them?)
Your children are standing in front of the boat. You can send them on the boat. You can go with them on the boat. Or you can cut their throats. That’s it. There’s nothing else.
I hand you the knife.
What do you do?
I think I’m starting to understand what the absence of clicking is. People who click process problems as if they’re in the real world. If they wouldn’t cut their child’s throat, then they sign their kid up for cryonics.
People who don’t click don’t process the problem like it’s the real world. Strange reactions rise up in them, fears of the unknown, fears of the known, and they react to these fears by running away within the landscape of their minds, and somewhere on the outside words come out of their lips like “But who knows what will happen? How can I send my kids into that?” It’s an expression of that inner fear, an expression of that running away, words coming out of the lips that match up to what’s going on inside their heads somehow… the dread of losing control, the feeling of not understanding, the horror of thinking about mortality, all of these are expressed in a flinch away from the uncomfortable thought and put stumblingly into words.
So they kill their children, because they aren’t processing a real world, they’re processing words connected to words, ways of flinching and running away and giving vent to those odd internal feelings.
And the clickers are standing in front of that boat.
Yes, I’m not a “clicker”. I realize this wasn’t addressed to me, but about me, but I don’t see how this should make me feel ashamed or even inadequate. I need to make ethical/moral decisions and I have no choice but to think through them on my own and make my own decision. When I was 16, I was certain that Proof by Induction would not work, and ever since I understood that it did work, I’ve never claimed certainty based on intuition. However, some arrogance remains in that if something doesn’t convince me, I think: why should I be convinced, if I’m not convinced? I haven’t had any feedback from life that my ability to make decisions isn’t working. I have some problems, but they don’t seem related in any way to not clicking. (Well, maybe I need to “click” on you guys just being too culturally different from me.)
I wonder if in response to your hypothetical you expect a reasonable me to suddenly realize, “oh no! I would never kill them!” and thus find the contradiction in my far-mode reasoning about cryonics. But I would. (Filling in drastic and dire reasons for why the children were being taken on a boat against my will.) So would you, I think, slip a deadly but painless pill to a young boy about to be tortured and killed in a religious ceremony if you were certain it was going to happen. Perhaps you were trying to identify an ethical failing: that at one probability of risk I “let them” live, but at a higher level I arbitrarily, cruelly kill them. I don’t think even this is correct; I don’t know where to begin to know how to reason where the ‘killing’ probability would be, and don’t claim that I do. I only know that it would be an agonizing thing for a parent to ever have to decide, but one they can’t escape from just by glibly pretending such scenarios cannot happen, if the scenario does happen.
I submit that I’m an open-minded and curious person that isn’t afraid of new ideas. (I might be afraid of a lion, but I’m not afraid of thinking about lions.) One problem that I seem to have – though I actually like it – is that I tend to forget what my reasoning on any topic is after a while, and I’m more or less a blank slate again. If I have a negative view of cryonics, when I never even heard of it outside of LW, I think it is because I found some inconsistency in your own world view about it.
For example, it hadn’t really occurred to me at first that ‘somebody strange’ might revive my daughter. My concerns were “near-concerns” – how in the world would I ever get an ambulance in time, much less get her frozen in time, in this backwater place I live in where they aren’t even competent enough to insert a child catheter correctly? But then I read several times this suspiciously repetitive chant that ‘they’re not worried’ about negative-value futures because being revived would select for positive futures.
Well, that’s clearly not dependable optimism. We might get revived just because they want to cut down on energy costs in Arizona, and keeping 20 million people frozen takes a lot of power. Maybe they have a penchant for realistic theater and want to simulate the Holocaust with real non-genetically modified humans.
In my mind, previous to hearing the chant, was that all of these scenarios were unlikely because the world is normal. Obama and byrnema and Joe 6-pack and maybe Eliezer have children, and then their children have children, and then the children of these revive us and we live in a world that is essentially the same or somewhat better. But when I process people talking about the set of possible futures like it’s actually really large enough to include all kinds of horrors with non-negligible probability, then unwarranted optimism in the direction of the probability of something I or they know nothing about does not comfort me.
That is the outcome of the group applying epistemic hygiene to only arguments that lead to conclusions they disagree with. The bad arguments for the views they agree with, left untouched, will sway a person like me who does not think in a linear way, but organically assimilates assumptions and hypotheses as I encounter them.
Your description of not-clicking sounds functionally similar to what Amanda Baggs calls ‘widgets’, though she uses the term in a more political than personal context.
This. This so god-damn hard.