That’s not my experience; a great deal of anti-cryonics stuff has been written, and it’s my experience that a lot of people who think it won’t work seem to have quite strong feelings about it, so if there is a strong argument that lots of people know then it is surprising that no-one has written it up properly.
kalia724′s comment is an apparently-strong argument that I’d never heard, and you know I’ve actively looked for arguments for and against. I do think you’re putting a bit much hope in absence of evidence of criticism as being non-negligible evidence of absence of possible criticism—the space of concepts working scientists don’t bother thinking about is ridiculously huge, and cryonics hits quite a few green-ink heuristics (unfairly, IMO, but it does) which gets it filed with the mental spam in short order. edit: and see my Facebook post for a mutual friend of ours noting he has qualms about even writing something serious about cryonics as he risks a significant professional status hit by doing so—cryonics is that low-status.
kalia724 evidently doesn’t have time to write this up properly in the foreseeable future, so I think we’d need to ask around to see if there is, at the least, a nameable neuroscientist who thinks kalia’s assertions against cryonics have something to them. (I’ve just hit my socialmediasphere with the question. You, and everyone else interested, probably should too.)
cryonics hits quite a few green-ink heuristics (unfairly, IMO, but it does) which gets it filed with the mental spam in short order.
Even the stupidest pseudosciences or movements have received excellent debunking; for example, I would put the Urantia cult way down the list below cryonics, and yet, we still have Martin Gardner’s 500 page examination/debunking, Urantia: The Great Cult Mystery.
(I would point out, incidentally, that ‘nobody will criticize low-status things’ is a fully comprehensive proof of the non-existence of the entire skeptics movement, which is pretty much all about criticizing low-status things, and you probably would prefer not to use such a claim as your explanation of the lack of good cryonics criticism...)
A quite obvious possibility is that would-be debunkers who want try to go deeper than Penn and Teller style mockery soon realize that they would have to engage much more seriously with cryonics than with Urantia to try to debunk it—sound like they were taking it seriously—implying a far greater loss of status than soaring casually above Urantia, effortlessly trashing it without a hint of sympathy.
“Everyone who’s tried to ‘debunk’ this seems to have ended up writing casual mockery, and oddly enough no would-be skeptics ever seem to engage the arguments in technical detail, and the arguments are being made by people who sure look like they’re trying to wear technical hats and include a number of otherwise highly technical figures” seems to me like a quite common position when both of these aspects are combined. There are arguments that skeptics don’t bother engaging in detail, but they’re not technical. There are physicists who believe crazy things because they’re bad outside the laboratory, but then they are usually refuted by more than mockery. I may be prejudiced by being mostly interested only in things that are sensible to start with, but the overall state of affairs I have just described is pretty much what you’d expect a correct but weird-sounding idea to look like.
I have no status in science, so your last phrase is just silly. Scientists who are noted sceptics may want to criticise cryonics, and, of course, several have. But the effect I describe is something I saw someone who’d been specifically asked to comment as a scientist invoking, per the link which you should be able to read (rather than relying entirely on theoretical counterarguments, as you have); and I am, of course, noting it as one factor, not as the complete explanation you seem to have read it as.
A quite obvious possibility is that would-be debunkers who want try to go deeper than Penn and Teller style mockery soon realize that they would have to engage much more seriously with cryonics than with Urantia to try to debunk it—sound like they were taking it seriously—implying a far greater loss of status than soaring casually above Urantia, effortlessly trashing it without a hint of sympathy.
“Everyone who’s tried to ‘debunk’ this seems to have ended up writing casual mockery, and oddly enough no would-be skeptics ever seem to engage the arguments in technical detail, and the arguments are being made by people who sure look like they’re trying to wear technical hats and include a number of otherwise highly technical figures” seems to me like a quite common position when both of these aspects are combined. There are arguments that skeptics don’t bother engaging in detail, but they’re not technical. There are physicists who believe crazy things because they’re bad outside the laboratory, but then they are usually refuted by more than mockery. I may be prejudiced by being mostly interested only in things that are sensible to start with, but the overall state of affairs I have just described is pretty much what you’d expect a correct but weird-sounding idea to look like.
I think you may be missing a silent majority of people who passively judge cryonics as unlikely to work, and do not develop strong feelings or opinions about it besides that, because they have no reason to. I think this category, together with “too expensive to think about right now”, forms the bulk of intelligent friends with whom I’ve discussed cryonics.
I don’t think you’re addressing the subject of this thread, which is “does there exist a strong technical argument against cryonics that a lot of people already know”.
Summary: Expanding on what maia wrote, I find it plausible that many people could produce good technical arguments against cryonics but don’t simply because they’re not writing about cryonics at all.
I was defending maia’s point that there are many people who are uninterested in cryonics and don’t think it will work. This class probably includes lots of people who have relevant expertise as well. So while there are a lot of people who develops strong anti-cryonics sentiments (and say so), I suspect they’re only a minority of the people who don’t think cryonics will work. So the fact that the bulk of anti-cryonics writings lack a tenable technical argument is only weak evidence that no one can produce one right now. It’s just that the people who can produce them aren’t interested enough to bother writing about cryonics at all.
I wholeheartedly agree that we should encourage people who may have them to write up strong technical arguments why cryonics won’t work.
That’s not my experience; a great deal of anti-cryonics stuff has been written, and it’s my experience that a lot of people who think it won’t work seem to have quite strong feelings about it, so if there is a strong argument that lots of people know then it is surprising that no-one has written it up properly.
kalia724′s comment is an apparently-strong argument that I’d never heard, and you know I’ve actively looked for arguments for and against. I do think you’re putting a bit much hope in absence of evidence of criticism as being non-negligible evidence of absence of possible criticism—the space of concepts working scientists don’t bother thinking about is ridiculously huge, and cryonics hits quite a few green-ink heuristics (unfairly, IMO, but it does) which gets it filed with the mental spam in short order. edit: and see my Facebook post for a mutual friend of ours noting he has qualms about even writing something serious about cryonics as he risks a significant professional status hit by doing so—cryonics is that low-status.
kalia724 evidently doesn’t have time to write this up properly in the foreseeable future, so I think we’d need to ask around to see if there is, at the least, a nameable neuroscientist who thinks kalia’s assertions against cryonics have something to them. (I’ve just hit my socialmediasphere with the question. You, and everyone else interested, probably should too.)
Even the stupidest pseudosciences or movements have received excellent debunking; for example, I would put the Urantia cult way down the list below cryonics, and yet, we still have Martin Gardner’s 500 page examination/debunking, Urantia: The Great Cult Mystery.
(I would point out, incidentally, that ‘nobody will criticize low-status things’ is a fully comprehensive proof of the non-existence of the entire skeptics movement, which is pretty much all about criticizing low-status things, and you probably would prefer not to use such a claim as your explanation of the lack of good cryonics criticism...)
A quite obvious possibility is that would-be debunkers who want try to go deeper than Penn and Teller style mockery soon realize that they would have to engage much more seriously with cryonics than with Urantia to try to debunk it—sound like they were taking it seriously—implying a far greater loss of status than soaring casually above Urantia, effortlessly trashing it without a hint of sympathy.
“Everyone who’s tried to ‘debunk’ this seems to have ended up writing casual mockery, and oddly enough no would-be skeptics ever seem to engage the arguments in technical detail, and the arguments are being made by people who sure look like they’re trying to wear technical hats and include a number of otherwise highly technical figures” seems to me like a quite common position when both of these aspects are combined. There are arguments that skeptics don’t bother engaging in detail, but they’re not technical. There are physicists who believe crazy things because they’re bad outside the laboratory, but then they are usually refuted by more than mockery. I may be prejudiced by being mostly interested only in things that are sensible to start with, but the overall state of affairs I have just described is pretty much what you’d expect a correct but weird-sounding idea to look like.
I have no status in science, so your last phrase is just silly. Scientists who are noted sceptics may want to criticise cryonics, and, of course, several have. But the effect I describe is something I saw someone who’d been specifically asked to comment as a scientist invoking, per the link which you should be able to read (rather than relying entirely on theoretical counterarguments, as you have); and I am, of course, noting it as one factor, not as the complete explanation you seem to have read it as.
A quite obvious possibility is that would-be debunkers who want try to go deeper than Penn and Teller style mockery soon realize that they would have to engage much more seriously with cryonics than with Urantia to try to debunk it—sound like they were taking it seriously—implying a far greater loss of status than soaring casually above Urantia, effortlessly trashing it without a hint of sympathy.
“Everyone who’s tried to ‘debunk’ this seems to have ended up writing casual mockery, and oddly enough no would-be skeptics ever seem to engage the arguments in technical detail, and the arguments are being made by people who sure look like they’re trying to wear technical hats and include a number of otherwise highly technical figures” seems to me like a quite common position when both of these aspects are combined. There are arguments that skeptics don’t bother engaging in detail, but they’re not technical. There are physicists who believe crazy things because they’re bad outside the laboratory, but then they are usually refuted by more than mockery. I may be prejudiced by being mostly interested only in things that are sensible to start with, but the overall state of affairs I have just described is pretty much what you’d expect a correct but weird-sounding idea to look like.
I think you may be missing a silent majority of people who passively judge cryonics as unlikely to work, and do not develop strong feelings or opinions about it besides that, because they have no reason to. I think this category, together with “too expensive to think about right now”, forms the bulk of intelligent friends with whom I’ve discussed cryonics.
I don’t think you’re addressing the subject of this thread, which is “does there exist a strong technical argument against cryonics that a lot of people already know”.
Summary: Expanding on what maia wrote, I find it plausible that many people could produce good technical arguments against cryonics but don’t simply because they’re not writing about cryonics at all.
I was defending maia’s point that there are many people who are uninterested in cryonics and don’t think it will work. This class probably includes lots of people who have relevant expertise as well. So while there are a lot of people who develops strong anti-cryonics sentiments (and say so), I suspect they’re only a minority of the people who don’t think cryonics will work. So the fact that the bulk of anti-cryonics writings lack a tenable technical argument is only weak evidence that no one can produce one right now. It’s just that the people who can produce them aren’t interested enough to bother writing about cryonics at all.
I wholeheartedly agree that we should encourage people who may have them to write up strong technical arguments why cryonics won’t work.