Rationality Bootcamp and Advanced Sanity Techniques? The first things sane and rational people do, are to exercise due diligence in gathering the facts before they make crazy and unfounded public statements such as:
1) “I suspect that Mike Darwin wants a grand narrative of Why, Oh Why Cryonics Fails, a grand narrative that makes sense of this shocking and incomprehensible fact and gives some info on what needs to be done to relieve the frustration.” and
2) “Mike Darwin thinks that if you have better preservation techniques, people will sign up in droves, because right now they’re hearing about cryonics and rejecting it because the preservation techniques aren’t good enough.”
Really? Not only don’t I believe those things to be true, I’ve never said that they were. Au contraire, the only grand narrative of why people haven’t embraced cryonics in droves is a very complicated one which, onto 40 years later, I’m still learning about and struggling to fully understand. In 1981 I wrote an article (with Steve Bridge) entitled “The Bricks in the Wall” about the many reasons why people find it difficult to embrace cryonics: http://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics8111.txt. If I recall correctly, there were at least a dozen reasons given in that essay, including things like loss of others, loss of self, lack of technical confidence, incompatible worldview, high social cost, fear of temporal displacement… Since that article was written, I’ve learned of many more reasons why people reject cryonics and why they don’t decide to opt for it—which, as it turns out, can be two very different things.
Ironically, much of my career in cryonics has been spent arguing against “the big idea,” “the grand solution,” “the magic bullet,” or “the single rich individual who will provide the solution to the problem of why cryonics has fared so poorly.” There is no single reason, unless you want to consider the myriad individual reasons, in aggregate, as a single cause of the failure. If you insist on that approach, then the best you will do (and you could do far worse) is to note that by any normal market standards, cryonics is a shitty product. It costs a lot, it is unproven, there are many commonplace reasons to believe that existing institutional structures have a poor chance of surviving long enough for the patients to be recovered, it has been plagued by legitimate scandals and failures and the constraints imposed by the existing medico-legal infrastructure mean that, statistically, you’ve got a ~30% chance of being autopsied, or otherwise so badly degraded that whoever it is that is recovered from the procedure isn’t very likely to be you (e.g., presumably if your DNA is intact a clone could be made). So cryonics doesn’t stack up very well as a normal market product.
Having said that, if you want to ‘sell’ cryonics as part of brainwashing package, or a religion, I’d be the first to say that it can probably done. It has been my observation that you can get people to do almost anything if you rob them of their will, and subvert their reason. For myself, I don’t think that’s a good idea.
As to the issue of improved preservation techniques causing people to sign up in droves, surely you jest? Any improvement in cryopreservation techniques short of fully reversible suspended animation will ‘only’ have an incremental effect. So for example, if organ cryopreservation for the kidney were achieved tomorrow, and organ banks for kidneys opened their doors 6 months later, I would indeed expect to see an increase in people opting for cryonics, but not a stampede.
Historically, the same was true of the introduction into cryonics of credible ideas for repairing cryoinjury and of scientific documentation that brain ultrastructure was surviving cryopreservation (under ideal conditions) reasonably well. Both of those advances widened the appeal of cryonics to a very small group of people. Nevertheless, they were significant, because if you have 40 members, and such advances give you 240, or a 1,040 - then that’s a huge benefit.
Finally, if reversible whole body suspended animation were developed tomorrow, the vast majority of people would still not opt for it. In fact, they more or less never would. What would have to happen first is that a relatively small cohort of the population who command respect, authority and power, would have to decide that it is in their interest to have suspended animation become a commonplace medical treatment. By this, I do not mean to imply some focused or intelligent cabal, or group of conspirators, but rather that all kinds of empowered people in many walks of life must be persuaded before the society at large will embrace cryonics. In other words, it will be a process and probably a complex one, before Mrs. Smith sits in her doctor’s office and is either offered, or asks about, suspended animation as a possible alternative to her ending up dead from her advanced ovarian cancer.
In my opinion there are no magic bullets. Rather, there are just a lot bricks in a large wall of opposition that have to be patiently worried away, one, or a few at a time. It’s all too easy to see TV coverage of the Berlin Wall coming down and say, “Jeeze, look how quick and easy that was!” Not. The back-story needs to be considered and in the case of cryonics that back-story has been unfolding for nearly fifty years—and there are still less than 2K people signed up worldwide.
Finally, it is indeed a cruel and unpleasant reality that life isn’t very rewarding for many people, and that it all but completely lacks the zest, joy and wonderful sense of adventure that can be seen in the eyes of any well cared for child. The biology of maturation and aging do much to drain away that sense of wonder and appetite for life. But it is much more likely the case that the way we lead our lives is the primary culprit. I recommend watching multiple episodes of a TV program called “Undercover Boss.” Just watch what people who work in factories, in offices, in laundries and in loo cleaning businesses do all day. It is horrible. It is, in fact, the exact opposite of the situation we DEMAND that children be in. Indeed, one of the most repellant things to people in the West is “child labor.” Well, if the normal workaday work is so horrible for children, what makes it good for adults? And if we propose to live for millennia, and longer, then don’t we, by definition, have to be as children: open, mobile, playful and exploring in our interaction with the world? I have done all kinds of jobs, from working at Mc Donald’s (2 years) to cleaning loos and dirty motel rooms. Work is a good and character building thing. But it can also be a corrosive and soul destroying thing that robs people of any strong desire to fight for life. Methinks that perhaps you need to work at McDonald’s dressing hamburger buns for a year or two.
Having said that, if you want to ‘sell’ cryonics as part of brainwashing package, or a religion, I’d be the first to say that it can probably done. It has been my observation that you can get people to do almost anything if you rob them of their will, and subvert their reason. For myself, I don’t think that’s a good idea.
Like it or not, lesswrong is likely one of the greatest allies cryonics has right now—and I would say this is not so much because of all the new recruits and fresh blood, but because of the training in rationality that it provides and ultimately injects into the cryonics community (among the other communities it intersects with). Because of this emphasis, lesswrong is actually pretty good insurance against cryonics becoming a cult.
I just read over my post, and I didn’t say (or imply) anything about lesswrong being a cult. I know almost nothing about lesswrong, beyond reading interesting posts here, from time to time, usually as a result of google searches. My proximate reason for posting here was that Gwern suggested I do so, and also pointed me specifically to this discussion. So I guess my question would be, “Why would anyone think that I would think lesswrong was a cult?”
My remarks about “selling cryonics as part of a cult” are long-standing ones, and go back to decisions that I and others consciously made about how we wanted to proceed back in the 1970s. Having been in a cult briefly from 1974-75, I have a good understanding of the social mechanics of breaking people down and rebuilding them in a way that is “more desirable” to whomever is doing the “human re-engineering.” There was not much question in my mind then or now that many people could be “converted” to cryonics by this expedient. The questions were about “should it be done?” Ironically, I got into that cult because the founders of Alcor thought that the “guru” running the operation would make cryonics a requirement for all of his adherents. -- Mike Darwin
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.
Rationality Bootcamp and Advanced Sanity Techniques? The first things sane and rational people do, are to exercise due diligence in gathering the facts before they make crazy and unfounded public statements such as:
1) “I suspect that Mike Darwin wants a grand narrative of Why, Oh Why Cryonics Fails, a grand narrative that makes sense of this shocking and incomprehensible fact and gives some info on what needs to be done to relieve the frustration.” and
2) “Mike Darwin thinks that if you have better preservation techniques, people will sign up in droves, because right now they’re hearing about cryonics and rejecting it because the preservation techniques aren’t good enough.”
Really? Not only don’t I believe those things to be true, I’ve never said that they were. Au contraire, the only grand narrative of why people haven’t embraced cryonics in droves is a very complicated one which, onto 40 years later, I’m still learning about and struggling to fully understand. In 1981 I wrote an article (with Steve Bridge) entitled “The Bricks in the Wall” about the many reasons why people find it difficult to embrace cryonics: http://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics8111.txt. If I recall correctly, there were at least a dozen reasons given in that essay, including things like loss of others, loss of self, lack of technical confidence, incompatible worldview, high social cost, fear of temporal displacement… Since that article was written, I’ve learned of many more reasons why people reject cryonics and why they don’t decide to opt for it—which, as it turns out, can be two very different things.
Ironically, much of my career in cryonics has been spent arguing against “the big idea,” “the grand solution,” “the magic bullet,” or “the single rich individual who will provide the solution to the problem of why cryonics has fared so poorly.” There is no single reason, unless you want to consider the myriad individual reasons, in aggregate, as a single cause of the failure. If you insist on that approach, then the best you will do (and you could do far worse) is to note that by any normal market standards, cryonics is a shitty product. It costs a lot, it is unproven, there are many commonplace reasons to believe that existing institutional structures have a poor chance of surviving long enough for the patients to be recovered, it has been plagued by legitimate scandals and failures and the constraints imposed by the existing medico-legal infrastructure mean that, statistically, you’ve got a ~30% chance of being autopsied, or otherwise so badly degraded that whoever it is that is recovered from the procedure isn’t very likely to be you (e.g., presumably if your DNA is intact a clone could be made). So cryonics doesn’t stack up very well as a normal market product.
Having said that, if you want to ‘sell’ cryonics as part of brainwashing package, or a religion, I’d be the first to say that it can probably done. It has been my observation that you can get people to do almost anything if you rob them of their will, and subvert their reason. For myself, I don’t think that’s a good idea.
As to the issue of improved preservation techniques causing people to sign up in droves, surely you jest? Any improvement in cryopreservation techniques short of fully reversible suspended animation will ‘only’ have an incremental effect. So for example, if organ cryopreservation for the kidney were achieved tomorrow, and organ banks for kidneys opened their doors 6 months later, I would indeed expect to see an increase in people opting for cryonics, but not a stampede.
Historically, the same was true of the introduction into cryonics of credible ideas for repairing cryoinjury and of scientific documentation that brain ultrastructure was surviving cryopreservation (under ideal conditions) reasonably well. Both of those advances widened the appeal of cryonics to a very small group of people. Nevertheless, they were significant, because if you have 40 members, and such advances give you 240, or a 1,040 - then that’s a huge benefit.
Finally, if reversible whole body suspended animation were developed tomorrow, the vast majority of people would still not opt for it. In fact, they more or less never would. What would have to happen first is that a relatively small cohort of the population who command respect, authority and power, would have to decide that it is in their interest to have suspended animation become a commonplace medical treatment. By this, I do not mean to imply some focused or intelligent cabal, or group of conspirators, but rather that all kinds of empowered people in many walks of life must be persuaded before the society at large will embrace cryonics. In other words, it will be a process and probably a complex one, before Mrs. Smith sits in her doctor’s office and is either offered, or asks about, suspended animation as a possible alternative to her ending up dead from her advanced ovarian cancer.
In my opinion there are no magic bullets. Rather, there are just a lot bricks in a large wall of opposition that have to be patiently worried away, one, or a few at a time. It’s all too easy to see TV coverage of the Berlin Wall coming down and say, “Jeeze, look how quick and easy that was!” Not. The back-story needs to be considered and in the case of cryonics that back-story has been unfolding for nearly fifty years—and there are still less than 2K people signed up worldwide.
Finally, it is indeed a cruel and unpleasant reality that life isn’t very rewarding for many people, and that it all but completely lacks the zest, joy and wonderful sense of adventure that can be seen in the eyes of any well cared for child. The biology of maturation and aging do much to drain away that sense of wonder and appetite for life. But it is much more likely the case that the way we lead our lives is the primary culprit. I recommend watching multiple episodes of a TV program called “Undercover Boss.” Just watch what people who work in factories, in offices, in laundries and in loo cleaning businesses do all day. It is horrible. It is, in fact, the exact opposite of the situation we DEMAND that children be in. Indeed, one of the most repellant things to people in the West is “child labor.” Well, if the normal workaday work is so horrible for children, what makes it good for adults? And if we propose to live for millennia, and longer, then don’t we, by definition, have to be as children: open, mobile, playful and exploring in our interaction with the world? I have done all kinds of jobs, from working at Mc Donald’s (2 years) to cleaning loos and dirty motel rooms. Work is a good and character building thing. But it can also be a corrosive and soul destroying thing that robs people of any strong desire to fight for life. Methinks that perhaps you need to work at McDonald’s dressing hamburger buns for a year or two.
Your hyperlink is broken, it has a period at the end of it.
The concern that lesswrong might be a cult has been dealt with extensively already.
Like it or not, lesswrong is likely one of the greatest allies cryonics has right now—and I would say this is not so much because of all the new recruits and fresh blood, but because of the training in rationality that it provides and ultimately injects into the cryonics community (among the other communities it intersects with). Because of this emphasis, lesswrong is actually pretty good insurance against cryonics becoming a cult.
I just read over my post, and I didn’t say (or imply) anything about lesswrong being a cult. I know almost nothing about lesswrong, beyond reading interesting posts here, from time to time, usually as a result of google searches. My proximate reason for posting here was that Gwern suggested I do so, and also pointed me specifically to this discussion. So I guess my question would be, “Why would anyone think that I would think lesswrong was a cult?”
My remarks about “selling cryonics as part of a cult” are long-standing ones, and go back to decisions that I and others consciously made about how we wanted to proceed back in the 1970s. Having been in a cult briefly from 1974-75, I have a good understanding of the social mechanics of breaking people down and rebuilding them in a way that is “more desirable” to whomever is doing the “human re-engineering.” There was not much question in my mind then or now that many people could be “converted” to cryonics by this expedient. The questions were about “should it be done?” Ironically, I got into that cult because the founders of Alcor thought that the “guru” running the operation would make cryonics a requirement for all of his adherents. -- Mike Darwin
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.
Do you refer to your time in the Galambosian cult?
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Galambosianism
BTW, according to Galambos’s beliefs about intellectual property, people owe me a royalty every time they use the word “singularitarian.”