Perhaps I got confused about what you were replying to exactly there.
My big issue with your post is that it seems to assume there are only two options that result in widespread adoption: sell it as a traditional product, or create an odious mind-control cult. What about the option of raising people’s sanity level so they can come to the conclusion on their own?
First, I should point out that I don’t believe the choices about how to increase success for cryonics are binary, as you lay them out above. While I don’t use the same language you do, my argument has been that it is not possible to get people to freely adopt cryonics in larger numbers, unless you change them, as opposed to trying to change cryonics, or how it is “marketed.”
You use the words “raising people’s sanity level” to describe the change you believe is necessary, before they are able to choose cryonics rationally. The dictionary definition of sanity is: “The ability to think and behave in a normal and rational manner; sound mental health.” I don’t know if that is the definition you are using, or not?
Depending upon how you define “rational,” “normal,” and “sound mental health,” we may be on the same page. I would say that most people currently operate with either contra-survival values, or effectively no values. Values are the core behavioral imperatives that individuals use in furtherance of their survival and their well being. It is easy to mistake these as being all about the individual, but in fact, they necessarily involve the whole community of individuals, because it is not (currently) possible for individual humans to survive without interaction with others. Beyond these baby steps at explanation, there is a lot that must be said, but clearly, not here and not now. What I’ve said here isn’t meant to be rigorous and complete, but rather to be exemplary of the position I hold (and that you asked me about).
It is also the case that not everyone has the biological machinery to make decisions at a very high level of thought or reasoning. And amongst those who do, arguably, few do so much of the time, especially in terms of epistemological questions (and none of us do it all of the time). That’s in part what culture is for. If we considered every decision in penultimate detail, we’d never get anything done. If the culture is bankrupt, then the situation is very bad, not just for survival of the individual, but for the civilization as a whole. So, you either fix that problem, or you don’t succeed with cryonics. Put another way, the failure of this culture to embrace cryonics and life extension is a symptom of the problem, rather than the primary problem itself. -- Mike Darwin
It is also the case that not everyone has the biological machinery to make decisions at a very high level of thought or reasoning.
What do you mean by this? You seem to imply that there are structural diffrences inherent in human brains that make some people capable of “a very high level of thought and reasoning” and some people incapable. That seems unlikely or even impossible: see The Psychological Unity of Humankind.
I do agree with you that some people do sometimes make decisions at a high level of thought and reasoning, and some people rarely or never do. Unless we’re talking about actual mental retardation, I think the differences would have to be mostly based on education and culture.
Only someone who hasn’t spent much time around people with 2-digit IQ’s would believe in “the psychological unity of humankind.” The empirical evidence shows that at least in the area of IQ or the General Intelligence Factor (g), marginal differences can have profound practical consequences:
Nick Bostrom in one of his talks even argues that raising everyone’s IQ by 10 points would revolutionize our society for the better, not by making the smartest people a little bit smarter, but by making hundreds of millions of the world’s dumbasses substantially smarter so that they would become more educable, develop lower time preferences and make better decisions in life.
Only someone who hasn’t spent much time around people with 2-digit IQ’s.
I looked at that sentence and thought “but people with 2-digit IQs make up 50% of the population! Surely I’ve spent plenty of time around them!” Then I read the article, and the description of people with IQs below 100% was surprising, to the point that I’m thinking maybe there’s been some sample bias in who I’m spending my time around. (Just because about 50% of the people in my high school had IQ’s below 100 doesn’t mean there were the ones taking physics and calculus with me, and although I’ve met people in nursing school who are abominable at things that seem obvious to me, like statistics, nursing probably requires fairly high intelligence, so my “unbiased sample” is probably still biased.)
The idea is unpleasant enough that I think I have some ideological bias against intelligence being that important. Probably because it seems unfair that something basically fixed in childhood and partly or mostly genetic (i.e. beyond the individual’s control and “not their fault”) should determine their life outcome. I don’t like the idea...but admitting that intelligence differences exist won’t make it any more awful.
It’s because what EY meant by the psychological unity of humankind was more along the lines of,
… everyone has a prefrontal cortex, everyone has a cerebellum, everyone has an amygdala, everyone has neurons that run at O(20Hz), everyone plans using abstractions.
We might disagree about the last one, but the first four are pretty much fixed.
Perhaps I got confused about what you were replying to exactly there.
My big issue with your post is that it seems to assume there are only two options that result in widespread adoption: sell it as a traditional product, or create an odious mind-control cult. What about the option of raising people’s sanity level so they can come to the conclusion on their own?
First, I should point out that I don’t believe the choices about how to increase success for cryonics are binary, as you lay them out above. While I don’t use the same language you do, my argument has been that it is not possible to get people to freely adopt cryonics in larger numbers, unless you change them, as opposed to trying to change cryonics, or how it is “marketed.”
You use the words “raising people’s sanity level” to describe the change you believe is necessary, before they are able to choose cryonics rationally. The dictionary definition of sanity is: “The ability to think and behave in a normal and rational manner; sound mental health.” I don’t know if that is the definition you are using, or not?
Depending upon how you define “rational,” “normal,” and “sound mental health,” we may be on the same page. I would say that most people currently operate with either contra-survival values, or effectively no values. Values are the core behavioral imperatives that individuals use in furtherance of their survival and their well being. It is easy to mistake these as being all about the individual, but in fact, they necessarily involve the whole community of individuals, because it is not (currently) possible for individual humans to survive without interaction with others. Beyond these baby steps at explanation, there is a lot that must be said, but clearly, not here and not now. What I’ve said here isn’t meant to be rigorous and complete, but rather to be exemplary of the position I hold (and that you asked me about).
It is also the case that not everyone has the biological machinery to make decisions at a very high level of thought or reasoning. And amongst those who do, arguably, few do so much of the time, especially in terms of epistemological questions (and none of us do it all of the time). That’s in part what culture is for. If we considered every decision in penultimate detail, we’d never get anything done. If the culture is bankrupt, then the situation is very bad, not just for survival of the individual, but for the civilization as a whole. So, you either fix that problem, or you don’t succeed with cryonics. Put another way, the failure of this culture to embrace cryonics and life extension is a symptom of the problem, rather than the primary problem itself. -- Mike Darwin
It’s partially a reference to this post.
What do you mean by this? You seem to imply that there are structural diffrences inherent in human brains that make some people capable of “a very high level of thought and reasoning” and some people incapable. That seems unlikely or even impossible: see The Psychological Unity of Humankind.
I do agree with you that some people do sometimes make decisions at a high level of thought and reasoning, and some people rarely or never do. Unless we’re talking about actual mental retardation, I think the differences would have to be mostly based on education and culture.
Only someone who hasn’t spent much time around people with 2-digit IQ’s would believe in “the psychological unity of humankind.” The empirical evidence shows that at least in the area of IQ or the General Intelligence Factor (g), marginal differences can have profound practical consequences:
Why g Matters: The Complexity of Everyday Life
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997whygmatters.pdf
Nick Bostrom in one of his talks even argues that raising everyone’s IQ by 10 points would revolutionize our society for the better, not by making the smartest people a little bit smarter, but by making hundreds of millions of the world’s dumbasses substantially smarter so that they would become more educable, develop lower time preferences and make better decisions in life.
I looked at that sentence and thought “but people with 2-digit IQs make up 50% of the population! Surely I’ve spent plenty of time around them!” Then I read the article, and the description of people with IQs below 100% was surprising, to the point that I’m thinking maybe there’s been some sample bias in who I’m spending my time around. (Just because about 50% of the people in my high school had IQ’s below 100 doesn’t mean there were the ones taking physics and calculus with me, and although I’ve met people in nursing school who are abominable at things that seem obvious to me, like statistics, nursing probably requires fairly high intelligence, so my “unbiased sample” is probably still biased.)
The idea is unpleasant enough that I think I have some ideological bias against intelligence being that important. Probably because it seems unfair that something basically fixed in childhood and partly or mostly genetic (i.e. beyond the individual’s control and “not their fault”) should determine their life outcome. I don’t like the idea...but admitting that intelligence differences exist won’t make it any more awful.
It’s because what EY meant by the psychological unity of humankind was more along the lines of,
We might disagree about the last one, but the first four are pretty much fixed.