(one that doesn’t originate with a cryonics institute)
Oh.
So, who exactly do you expect to be doing this analysis? The most competent candidates are the cryobiologists, and they are ideologically committed to cryonics not working and have in the past demonstrated their dishonesty\*.
* Literally; I understand the bylaw banning any cryonicists from the main cryobiology association is still in effect.
** eg. by claiming on TV cryonics couldn’t work because of the ‘exploding lysosomes post-death’ theory, even after experiments had disproven the theory.
Cryonicists have the same incentive to lie. Reading the current article series of Mike Darwin on Chronopause.com makes a good case on how cryonics currently is broken.
I hope you appreciate the irony of bringing up Darwin’s articles on the quality of cryopreservation in the context of someone demanding articles on quality by someone not associated with cryonics institutes.
Do you have a specific example of a pro-cryonics lie? Because as far as I can tell, Mike is arguing for incompetence and not dishonesty or ideological bias as the culprit.
Incompetence is at least as bad as dishonesty. Not sure if it can be distinguished.
No! The distinction not only exists but is incredibly important to this context. Incompetence is a problem of an unqualified person doing the job. It can be fixed by many things, e.g. better on-the-job training, better education, or experience. Replacing them with a more qualified candidate is also an option, assuming you can find one.
With a dishonest person, you have a problem of values; they are likely to defect rather than behave superrationally in game-theoretic situations. The only way to deal with that is to keep them out of positions that require trust.
Dishonesty can be used to cover one’s tracks when one is incompetent. (Bob Nelson was doing this.) I’m not arguing that incompetence isn’t Bayesean evidence for dishonesty—it is. However, there are plenty of other explanations for incompetence as well: cognitive bias (e.g. near/far bias), lack of relevant experience, personality not suited to the job, extreme difficulty of the job, lack of information and feedback to learn from mistakes, lack of time spent learning the job...
Of all these, why did your mental pattern-matching algorithms choose to privilege dishonesty as likely to be prevalent? Doesn’t the fact that there is all this public information about their failings strike you as evidence that they are generally more interested in learning from their mistakes rather than covering their tracks?
I’ve even seen Max More (Alcor’s current CEO) saying positive things about Chronosphere, despite having been personally named and criticized in several of Darwin’s articles. The culture surrounding cryonics during the few years I’ve been observing it actually seems to be one of skeptical reserve and indeed hunger for criticism.
Moreover, the distinction cuts both ways: Multiple cryobiologists who are highly competent in their field have repeatedly made demonstrably false statements about cryonics, and have demonstrated willingness to use political force to silence the opposition. There is no inherent contradiction in the statement that they are competent and dishonest, both capable of doing a good job and willing to refuse to do so. Morality is not the same thing as ability.
So, who exactly do you expect to be doing this analysis?
No idea. Particularly if all cryobiologists are so committed to discrediting cryonics that they’ll ignore/distort the relevant science. I’m not sure how banning cryonicists* from the cryobiology association is a bad thing though. Personally I think organisations like the American Psychiatric Association should follow suit and ban all those with financial ties to pharmaceutical companies.
I just want to know how far cryonics needs to go in preventing information-theoretic death in order to allow people to be “brought back to life” and to what extent current cryonics can fulfil that criterion.
* This is assuming that by cryonicists you mean people who work for cryonics institutes or people who support cryonics without having an academic background in cryobiology.
This is assuming that by cryonicists you mean people who work for cryonics institutes or people who support cryonics without having an academic background in cryobiology.
I’ve been finding ChronoPause.com to be a very insightful blog. I can’t speak to the degree of bias of the author, but most of the posts I’ve read so far have been reasonably well cited.
I found it sort of terrifying to read the case reports he links in that comment—I read 101, 102, and 103, and it largely spoke to this being a distinctly amateur organization that is still running everything on hope and guesswork, not precise engineering/scientific principles.
Case 101 in particular sort of horrifies me for the aspects of preserving someone who committed suicide, without any consent from the individual in question. I can’t help but feel that “patient must be held in dry ice for at least two weeks” is also a rather bad sign.
Feel free to read them for yourself and draw your own conclusions—these reports are straight from CI itself, so you can reasonably assume that, if anything, they have a bias towards portraying themselves favorably.
Is there anywhere I can find a decent analysis of the effectiveness and feasibility of our current methods of cryonic preservation?
(one that doesn’t originate with a cryonics institute)
Well, that doesn’t seem too difficult -
Oh.
So, who exactly do you expect to be doing this analysis? The most competent candidates are the cryobiologists, and they are ideologically committed to cryonics not working and have in the past demonstrated their dishonesty\*.
* Literally; I understand the bylaw banning any cryonicists from the main cryobiology association is still in effect. ** eg. by claiming on TV cryonics couldn’t work because of the ‘exploding lysosomes post-death’ theory, even after experiments had disproven the theory.
Cryonicists have the same incentive to lie. Reading the current article series of Mike Darwin on Chronopause.com makes a good case on how cryonics currently is broken.
I hope you appreciate the irony of bringing up Darwin’s articles on the quality of cryopreservation in the context of someone demanding articles on quality by someone not associated with cryonics institutes.
No, since his articles make the case against current cryonics organisations, despite coming from a strong supporter of the idea.
Do you have a specific example of a pro-cryonics lie? Because as far as I can tell, Mike is arguing for incompetence and not dishonesty or ideological bias as the culprit.
Incompetence is at least as bad as dishonesty. Not sure if it can be distinguished.
No! The distinction not only exists but is incredibly important to this context. Incompetence is a problem of an unqualified person doing the job. It can be fixed by many things, e.g. better on-the-job training, better education, or experience. Replacing them with a more qualified candidate is also an option, assuming you can find one.
With a dishonest person, you have a problem of values; they are likely to defect rather than behave superrationally in game-theoretic situations. The only way to deal with that is to keep them out of positions that require trust.
Dishonesty can be used to cover one’s tracks when one is incompetent. (Bob Nelson was doing this.) I’m not arguing that incompetence isn’t Bayesean evidence for dishonesty—it is. However, there are plenty of other explanations for incompetence as well: cognitive bias (e.g. near/far bias), lack of relevant experience, personality not suited to the job, extreme difficulty of the job, lack of information and feedback to learn from mistakes, lack of time spent learning the job...
Of all these, why did your mental pattern-matching algorithms choose to privilege dishonesty as likely to be prevalent? Doesn’t the fact that there is all this public information about their failings strike you as evidence that they are generally more interested in learning from their mistakes rather than covering their tracks?
I’ve even seen Max More (Alcor’s current CEO) saying positive things about Chronosphere, despite having been personally named and criticized in several of Darwin’s articles. The culture surrounding cryonics during the few years I’ve been observing it actually seems to be one of skeptical reserve and indeed hunger for criticism.
Moreover, the distinction cuts both ways: Multiple cryobiologists who are highly competent in their field have repeatedly made demonstrably false statements about cryonics, and have demonstrated willingness to use political force to silence the opposition. There is no inherent contradiction in the statement that they are competent and dishonest, both capable of doing a good job and willing to refuse to do so. Morality is not the same thing as ability.
No idea. Particularly if all cryobiologists are so committed to discrediting cryonics that they’ll ignore/distort the relevant science. I’m not sure how banning cryonicists* from the cryobiology association is a bad thing though. Personally I think organisations like the American Psychiatric Association should follow suit and ban all those with financial ties to pharmaceutical companies.
I just want to know how far cryonics needs to go in preventing information-theoretic death in order to allow people to be “brought back to life” and to what extent current cryonics can fulfil that criterion.
* This is assuming that by cryonicists you mean people who work for cryonics institutes or people who support cryonics without having an academic background in cryobiology.
No.
There are cryobiologists who are cryonicists, e,g. the authors of this paper.
The paper does not mention cryonics, nor does the lead author’s bio mention being a member of the Society for Cryobiology.
So the by-law bans anyone sympathetic to cryonics?
See this article by Mike Darwin.
Thanks!
I’m starting to suspect that my dream of finding an impartial analysis of cryonics is doomed to be forever unfulfilled…
chronopause.com/index.php/2011/02/23/does-personal-identity-survive-cryopreservation/#comment-247
I’ve been finding ChronoPause.com to be a very insightful blog. I can’t speak to the degree of bias of the author, but most of the posts I’ve read so far have been reasonably well cited.
I found it sort of terrifying to read the case reports he links in that comment—I read 101, 102, and 103, and it largely spoke to this being a distinctly amateur organization that is still running everything on hope and guesswork, not precise engineering/scientific principles.
Case 101 in particular sort of horrifies me for the aspects of preserving someone who committed suicide, without any consent from the individual in question. I can’t help but feel that “patient must be held in dry ice for at least two weeks” is also a rather bad sign.
Feel free to read them for yourself and draw your own conclusions—these reports are straight from CI itself, so you can reasonably assume that, if anything, they have a bias towards portraying themselves favorably.
Only one technical analysis of cryonics which concludes it won’t work has ever been written: http://blog.ciphergoth.org/blog/2011/08/04/martinenaite-and-tavenier-cryonics/
Interesting, thanks!
Have you come across any analysis that establishes cryonics as something that prevents information-theoretic death?
We don’t know whether it does or not. The current most in-depth discussion is Scientific Justification of Cryonics Practice