I’ll say Hi and I’ll post this link which describes a study that showed that people are more likely to believe in pseudoscience if they are told that scientists disapprove of it:
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/146552
They are also much more likely to believe in pseudoscience if it has popular support.
BTW, it’s ironic, given the goals of this web site, how much groupthink occurs with regard to cryonics. Robin and Eliezer have biased the crowd a lot on this one.
I posted an argument here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1mc/normal_cryonics/1i92
I didn’t see a major criticism. There were some interesting responses and questions, like what constitutes a 5% increase in quality of life (I don’t know; it’s a crude metric), but my point stands. You’re better off spending your money on marginal increases in quality of life with high probabilities of success than on cryonics.
Here’s a simple metric to demonstrate why alternatives to cryonics could be preferred:
Suppose we calculate the overall value of living as the quantity of life multiplied by the quality of life. For lack of a better metric, we can rate our quality of life from 1 to 100. Thus one really good year (quality = 100) is equal to 100 really bad years (ql = 1). If you think quality of life is more important, you can use a larger metric, like 1 to 1000. But for our purposes, let’s use a scale to 100.
Some transhumanists have calculated that your life expectancy without aging is about 1300 years (because there’s still an annual probability that you will die from an accident, homicide, etc.). Conservatively, let’s assume that if cryonics and revivification are successful, you can expect to live for another 1000 years. Also, knowing nothing else about the future, your quality of life will be ~50. Thus your total life-index points gained is 50,000. But suppose that the probability that cryonics/revivification will be successful is 1 in 10,000, or .0001. Thus the expected utility points gained is .0001 * 50,000 = 50.
It will cost your $300/year for the rest of your life to gain those expected 50 points. But suppose you could spend that $300 a year on something that is 80% likely to increase your quality of life by 5 points a year (only 5%) for the rest of your life (let’s say another 50 years). There are all kinds of things that could do that: vacations, games, lovers, whatever. That’s .80 5 50 = 200 expected utility points.
You’re better off spending your money on things that are highly likely to increase your quality of life here and now, then on things that are highly unlikely or unknown to increase your quantity and quality of life in the future.
What is the calculated utility of signing up for cryonics? I’ve never seen a figure.
Plus, suicide allows you to make a controlled Exit and a controlled delivery in the cryopreserved state. You could die in a car accident, trapped in the wreckage for hours before they extract you, while your brain degenerates. You could be shot in the head. You could develop a neural disease or a brain tumor.
You just can’t take these chances. The rational solution is suicide at an early age.
Taking the cryonics mindset to its logical conclusion, the most “rational” thing to do is commit suicide at age 30 and have yourself cryopreserved. Waiting until a natural death at a ripe old age, there may be too much neural damage to reconstitute the mind/brain. And since you’re destined to die anyway, isn’t the loss of 50 years of life a rational trade off for the miniscule chance of infinite life?
NO.
“So, yeah. I believe in God. I figure my particular beliefs are a little irrelevant at this point.”
I think the particulars of your beliefs are important, because they reveal how irrational you might be. Most people get away with God belief because it isn’t immediately contradicted by experience. If you merely believe a special force permeates the universe, that’s not testable and doesn’t affect your life, really. However, if you believe this force is intelligent and interacts with the world (causes miracles, led the Israelites out of Egypt, etc.), these are testable and falsifiable claims (the Exodus should have left evidence of a large semitic migration through the Sinai, but none exists, for example), and believing them in light of disconfirmatory evidence makes you more irrational.
Because of this lack of testability, it’s much easier to believe in vague gods than, for example, that your next lottery ticket will be a winner.
Posts like this are the reason I read this blog. Great job.
It shouldn’t be surprising that psychological differences inform our political intuitions. Hollywood doesn’t make people liberal. Artistic / creative people are more likely to be liberal, and they’re more likely to move to Hollywood.
We can define a psychological dimension as authoritarian vs non-authoritarian. Non-authoritarian psychology makes people more experimental and creative. They color outside the lines. They are more interested in art, theater, acting or music. They are more likely to experiment with alternative religions and spiritual practices (or no religion at all). They are more likely to be politically liberal. That’s probably why religion has the strongest correlation to political views. It’s the same underlying psychology.
The alternative is an authoritarian psychology that makes people favor law enforcement, punishment, mainstream religion (especially of a morally authoritarian kind), and more culturally mainstream forms of activity and recreation (less likely to experiment with drugs, for example). It makes people less experimental in their clothing, choice of music, etc. It’s more likely to make you a political conservative.
While not all conservatives are authoritarian, 99% of authoritarians are conservative (there was a paper published about that, but I can’t find it right now).
Can I go ahead and call a bias? People who earn less, are less happy, or believe they are less successful than their peers are less likely to fill out this survey.
We tend to use trivial examples to illustrate sunk costs, like deciding whether to go to the movies, or deciding whether to leave a restaurant if the food is bad, but there are important real world situations where these considerations matter. For example, many people are afraid to change careers mid stream because they are afraid that all their education and experience up to that point would be a waste of time. They’ve already spent thousands of dollars on a degree, or tens of thousands of dollars on a professional degree, and now they have to start over? But isn’t that better than being miserable for the rest of your career? You can’t get your tuition and your time back, but you can still make yourself happier.
I’m agnostic to the heuristic you propose, but I disagree with applying it to the metric that you use (being pro- or anti-science). Scientific progress might be slowed by respecting genetic privacy rights, but we could say the same of any privacy rights (or, indeed, many other things). Imagine how much faster sociology and psychology could advance if we knew what everybody does in the privacy of their homes. Surely there are considerations more important than the advancement of science.
“How many non-fiction books did you read in the last month? How many fiction books?”
I would rather phrase this: “How many pages have you read in the last month?” I’ve read zero books, but I’ve read ~200 pages of journal articles. Others may read hundreds of newspaper pages in a month. Plus, some books are 200 pages long, others are 600 pages long, so it’s better to ask directly about pages of text, irrespective of the medium.
“Are you signed up for cryonics? Views on cryonics.”
This is a LW / OB bias. Why cryonics as opposed to the many other technoscientific and transhumanist topics out there? Because Eliezer and Robin hyped it up.
“Overconfidence leads to bad play.”
As an avid chess player, I can tell you that this is true in chess as well. People look at brilliant sacrifices by grandmasters (Bobby Fischer was famous for this) and think they are brilliant enough to pull off the same thing. In my experience, 80-90% of material sacrifices fail. When they do succeed, it is usually because the sacrificer is considerably better than her opponent. I’ve learned to subdue my desire for a sacrifice and a quick strike and work on a longterm plan instead.